This week, a new Chinese artificial intelligence startup, led by one of the field’s foremost experts, made a significant global impact by unveiling an open-source AI model that appears to surpass Meta’s own model in crucial metrics. This early success positions the company, named 01.AI, as an early contender in what its founder perceives as a competition between the U.S. and China for supremacy in the field of artificial intelligence.
Founded by CEO Kai-Fu Lee, the former head of Google in China and co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Artificial Intelligence Council, 01.AI has rapidly emerged onto the scene. Lee, known for his bestselling book “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order,” published in 2018, argues that China has the potential to surpass the U.S. and become the global leader in AI technology. Despite assembling his team as recently as March, Lee has swiftly recruited over 100 employees from both multinational corporations and Chinese firms. Operating since June, 01.AI has already garnered a valuation of over $1 billion from investors, including Lee’s venture firm, Sinovation Ventures, and Alibaba Cloud.
This Sunday, 01.AI made a formidable entry into the scene by unveiling Yi-34B, an open-source large language model (LLM) that its CEO, Lee, described as a “compelling alternative” to Meta’s LLaMA 2. LLMs, akin to models like ChatGPT, are AI models trained on extensive data to generate text, although their applications extend beyond text generation. The model, accessible in both English and Chinese, swiftly gained recognition for claiming the top spot over the weekend in the rankings of pre-trained base LLMs on the open-source community Hugging Face, surpassing even Meta’s acclaimed model.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Lee acknowledged LLaMA 2 as “the gold standard” for the open-source community but expressed his aim to provide a superior alternative not only for China but for the global market. He reiterated on Twitter the following Monday that his “underlying vision” was to “make better AI accessible to more people.” Lee anticipates that the globally available model will prove valuable to various entities, including multinational banks and insurers.
Lee conveyed to TechCrunch over the weekend that, although China currently lags behind the U.S. in Large Language Model (LLM) technology, there is “no doubt China can build better applications than American developers” owing to the country’s “phenomenal mobile internet ecosystem.” It seems that the company will direct its emphasis toward this aspect. Lee emphasized, “The duty is not just to push out good research models, but even more importantly to make application development easy so that there can be compelling applications.” He underscored that, ultimately, it is an ecosystem play.
Anticipating increased restrictions from the U.S. on Chinese access to essential chips for developing AI models, 01.AI reportedly initiated the stockpiling of these chips earlier this year. To finance this endeavor, the company borrowed funds from Lee’s venture firm. Lee expressed to Bloomberg, “We basically bet the farm and overspent our original bank account. We felt we had to do this.” In a separate interview with TechCrunch, Lee mentioned that his company currently possesses a sufficient supply of chips to last for at least a year.
In various interviews, Lee has positioned 01.AI as a necessary response to U.S. restrictions that have hindered China’s progress in the field of AI. He emphasized to TechCrunch, “Unlike the rest of the world, China doesn’t have access to OpenAI and Google because those two companies did not make their products available in China, so I think many doing LLM are trying to do their part in creating a solution for a market that really needs this.”
The significance of this endeavor is evident to Lee, who has extensively written about what he perceives as the impending battle between China and the U.S. for supremacy in AI.
Born in Taiwan, Lee relocated to the U.S. during high school and pursued a major in computer science at Columbia University. Since then, he has devoted much of his life to the field of AI. According to Bloomberg, in his 1982 graduate school application to Carnegie Mellon, Lee stated his intention to dedicate his life to the field. Six years later, for his doctoral dissertation, Lee claimed to have created “the world’s first large-vocabulary speech-recognition model,” as reported by Time. He subsequently held leadership positions at Google in China, as well as top executive roles at Microsoft and Apple, before establishing his own venture firm.
However, it is through his writings on AI that Lee has gained the most recognition. He authored two best-selling books on the subject, “AI Superpowers” and “AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future,” consistently cautioning about the anticipated economic and social disruptions that AI is poised to bring before the century’s end.
In a 2017 op-ed for The New York Times, Lee predicted that AI technology would result in heightened wealth concentration, increased corporate profits, and widespread unemployment. This scenario, he argued, would necessitate an “inevitable” decision to raise taxes on AI-profitable corporations and allocate substantial portions of the funds to those who have lost their jobs due to automation.
On a global scale, Lee envisioned a future where the U.S. and China emerge as the two dominant forces in the AI landscape, compelling other nations to align with one of these powers. He foresaw these countries exchanging international support for their domestic populations in return for permitting the parent country’s AI companies to profit from the dependent nation’s users. He wrote, “Unless they wish to plunge their people into poverty, they will be forced to negotiate with whichever country supplies most of their A.I. software—China or the United States—to essentially become that country’s economic dependent, taking in welfare subsidies in exchange for letting the ‘parent’ nation’s A.I. companies continue to profit from the dependent country’s users.”
This year, Time recognized Lee as one of the most influential figures in the field. In an interview, he emphasized the need for increased regulation to prepare for the impending changes. “A lot more needs to be done,” he stated. “When AI is this powerful, capable of discovering things we didn’t know before, it might be used to come up with new ways of harming others, creating weapons, using misinformation to manipulate people for profit, or evil intent.”
