Tech pioneer Kai-Fu Lee aims to bring China its ChatGPT moment | World News
By Saritha Rai
The Beijing startup founded by technology pioneer Kai-Fu Lee is introducing its first consumer artificial intelligence application, a step that aims to help China capitalize on this promising technology.
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Similar to Microsoft Corp.’s Office 365 Copilot, it helps users create spreadsheets, documents and slideshows faster — although it is primarily tailored for the Chinese market. It can interpret financial reports, take minutes for meetings, and read books as long as Elon Musk’s 600,000-word biography to provide a quick synopsis. The app works in Chinese and English.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Lee said China needs its own ChatGPT — the OpenAI chatbot that was launched in 2022 and is banned in the country — to accelerate interest, adoption and investment.
“For Americans, the moment happened 17 months ago,” Lee said during a Zoom call from Beijing. “Users in China haven’t had a ChatGPT moment. So far, none of the Chinese chatbots or tools have been good enough.”
While US companies such as OpenAI, Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc. have taken the lead in generative AI, Chinese players are pushing hard to catch up. In addition to 01.AI, technology players including Baidu Inc. and TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. are investing funds in developing their own AI models and chatbot services. Beijing has also provided financial and political support. Beijing bans foreign AI models, in part due to its strict censorship regime, but the so-called Great Firewall also ensures that domestic players will have a huge local market without global competition.
The Taiwan-born 62-year-old — who worked for Apple Inc. and Google before starting his own venture capital firm more than a decade ago — became CEO of 01.AI last year. The startup reached a $1 billion valuation, or unicorn status, in eight months on the strength of an open-source AI model that outperformed Silicon Valley rivals by several key measures.
In addition to Wanzhi, the company is also introducing a larger proprietary language model – the technology that underpins AI chatbots – called Yi-Large, aimed at business users.
Software developers will be able to use the Yi-Large model at competitive prices. Lee says the model’s application programming interface, or API, will cost $2.50 per 1 million input tokens and $12 per 1 million output tokens — about 1 million tokens allows a developer send approximately 250 queries back and forth. That’s much less than with OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo, he said.
Like many Chinese companies, 01.AI has stockpiled “graphics processing unit” semiconductors from Nvidia Corp. when it became apparent that the US government was planning to ban the export of high-end chips like the H100s used to train core AI services. . Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the Chinese e-commerce giant that invested in Lee’s company, provided an additional supply of H100s, and 01.AI supplemented its needs with slightly slower and less powerful Nvidia H800 processors.
“Our models were trained on H100 processors brought legally to China,” said Lee. “Necessity is the mother of invention, we extract everything we can from the available computing.”
In contrast to many global AI startups, Lee said 01.AI is approaching profitability. After training the models on Chinese and universal datasets, Lee is globalizing the models and applications and signing domestic and foreign clients to increase revenue in the coming year.
After a month and a half of user testing, Lee’s company is launching a version of Wanzhi for PC browsers with more comprehensive features, and one for cell phones, accessible through the WeChat messaging service. He appears in video tutorials on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, to train potential users.
“The year 2024 will be explosive for generative AI applications in China,” said Lee.
Lee said his startup is closing the second tranche of a $250 million pre-Series A round in a few weeks, and by the end of the year it will begin looking for investors for its Series A. The company has also streamlined its hardware processes and software to maximize efficiency and keep costs low.
“When GPT-5 arrives, we will be a few steps behind,” said Lee, referring to OpenAI’s purported next-generation AI model. But 01.AI is focused on making AI accessible rather than creating massive, more expensive models. “You can build a giant, amazing spaceship, but can it take you from Sacramento to San Francisco?”
