Lee’s business, 01.AI, is launching a absolutely free productiveness assistant named Wanzhi, the most up-to-date in a collection of AI items it’s acquiring. Identical to Microsoft Corp.’s Workplace 365 Copilot, it allows people create spreadsheets, paperwork and slide shows far more quickly—though it is primarily customized for the Chinese current market. It can interpret money reviews, acquire minutes for conferences and pace-go through guides as extensive as Elon Musk’s 600,000-word biography to give a rapid synopsis. The application is effective in Chinese and English. 

In an interview with Bloomberg, Lee mentioned that China desires its personal ChatGPT—OpenAI’s chatbot that was produced in 2022 and is banned in the country—to accelerate interest, adoption and expenditure. 

“For People, the second occurred 17 months in the past,” Lee reported more than a Zoom call from Beijing. “China’s customers didn’t have a ChatGPT instant. Until finally now, none of the Chinese chatbots or equipment have been good ample.”

Even though U.S. corporations these as OpenAI, Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc. have taken the direct in generative AI, Chinese players are pressing tough to catch up. In addition to 01.AI, tech players including Baidu Inc. and TikTok-mum or dad ByteDance Ltd. are pouring money into acquiring their have AI versions and chatbot providers. Beijing has also presented money and policy assistance. Beijing bars foreign AI products in aspect because of its rigorous censorship regime, but the so-known as Fantastic Firewall also guarantees that domestic gamers will have an tremendous local current market without having world wide opposition.

The Taiwan-born 62-12 months-old—who worked for Apple Inc. and Google just before starting up his own undertaking cash organization more than a ten years ago—became main executive officer at 01.AI previous 12 months. The startup attained a $1 billion valuation, or unicorn status, inside eight months on the energy of an open up-source AI model that outperformed Silicon Valley rivals on many essential steps.

In addition to Wanzhi, the firm is also introducing a greater, proprietary massive language model—the know-how underpinning AI chatbots—called Yi-Significant, aimed at enterprise people.

Application developers will be equipped to use the Yi-Huge design at aggressive price ranges. Lee suggests the model’s software programming interface, or API, will expense $2.50 for 1 million enter tokens and $12 for 1 million output tokens—about 1 million tokens lets a developer send around ship 250 queries back and forth. Which is far significantly less than with OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo, he reported.

Like numerous Chinese organizations, 01.AI stockpiled “graphics processing unit” semiconductors from Nvidia Corp. when it grew to become apparent the U.S. authorities was arranging to ban the export of superior-close chips, these as the H100s that are used to practice major AI products and services. Alibaba Team Keeping Ltd., the Chinese e-commerce giant that invested in Lee’s agency, presented an supplemental offer of H100s, and 01.AI supplemented its requires with a little slower and fewer impressive Nvidia H800 processors. 

“Our products have been skilled on H100s processors lawfully introduced into China,” Lee mentioned. “Necessity is the mother of invention, we squeeze anything we can from the compute obtainable.”

In distinction to many international AI startups, Lee explained 01.AI is nearing profitability. Soon after education the styles on Chinese and universal data sets, Lee is having the products and applications world-wide, and signing up domestic as nicely as abroad consumers to strengthen income upcoming year. 

Just after a thirty day period-and-a-fifty percent of testing on customers, Lee’s enterprise is rolling a model of Wanzhi for Computer browsers with much more in depth options, and just one for mobiles, accessible by way of the messaging service WeChat. He’s showing in movie tutorials on Douyin, the Chinese edition of TikTok, to mentor likely people. 

“The 12 months 2024 will be explosive for generative AI applications in China,” Lee mentioned.

Lee stated his startup is closing the 2nd tranche of a $250 million pre-Sequence A round in a couple of months and, by the year’s close, will start off looking for buyers for its Sequence A. The firm has also streamlined its components and software procedures to increase efficiency and retain costs down.

“When GPT-5 comes, we will be techniques behind,” Lee claimed, referring to OpenAI’s rumored upcoming-generation AI model. But 01.AI is focused on generating AI reasonably priced fairly than generating substantial, a lot more pricey models. “You can create a huge wonderful spaceship, but can it acquire you from Sacramento to San Francisco?”

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