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Kai Fu Lee's New AI Company: Yi-Open Source
- wtfpo 3y agoso by downloading some open source data sets, owning a few nvida A100s , -> train, an open source model form scratch using these datasets, get some investors to invest = billion dollar valuation?
- mark_l_watson 3y agoI read the first paragraph of a paywalled article that said that the company has a $1B evaluation in less than a year. I have always been a fan - I bought his PhD Thesis to read about 40 years ago. Kai Fu Lee has had an interesting career!
- throwaway4good 3y agoThe valuation is mentioned this TechCrunch article as well: https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/05/valued-at-1b-kai-fu-lees-llm-startup-unveils-open-source-model/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/05/valued-at-1b-kai-fu-lees-l... Valued at $1B, Kai-Fu Lee’s LLM startup unveils open source model … The startup’s ability to commence model training quickly is no doubt an outcome of its smooth fundraising, which is critical to securing top-tier talent and AI processors. While declining to disclose how much 01.AI has raised, Lee said it’s valued at $1 billion after receiving financing from Sinovation Ventures, Alibaba Cloud and other undisclosed investors.
- whitten 3y agoWhat was his thesis about ?
- mark_l_watson 3y agoThe thesis described the Sphinx speech to text system. It ran, if I remember correctly, on a few VAX minicomputers. In the early part of my career (first 20 years) I concentrated on tackling very difficult problems wherever I worked, accepting some failures and some successes. Reading his thesis was important to me because it gave me a feeling for trying to solve hard problems in a low resource environment (although I did have a Lisp Machine, access to a Connection Machine and a Butterfly Machine - so not terribly resource poor!) For what it’s worth: I am in my 70s, still waste deep in AI tech, and I still look for a few people to follow to get inspired.
- ycdavidsmith 3y agoYou inspire me.
- echelon 3y agoWhat is up with all of these {number}.ai companies? 01.ai 11.ai https://twelvelabs.io https://twelvelabs.io (couldn't get 12.ai, huh?) There are about a half dozen more. I'm laughing at the domain squatter that bought 900.ai, 99999.ai, and 1234567.ai This has to be the worst possible thing to name your company.
- growt 3y agoBefore the Internet companies would name themselves „1a-locksmith“ to appear first in the yellow pages in book form. Maybe we have gone full cycle?
- antupis 3y ago420.ai, 69.ai or 666.ai are much worse.
- staunton 3y agoShh, Elon might get some ideas...
- simion314 3y agomade me laugh, thinking that next Elon domain would be xxx.xxx to max the X.
- dheera 3y agoIn Chinese, 666 is a very good number. 6 sounds like the character 溜 which technically means something like smooth flowing but is used to compliment someone's well-practiced skills. "666" is often said when someone does something impressive and smoothly. Like if someone double-flips a pancake and it lands perfectly, that's the kind of situation you'd say "666" to compliment them.
- CaptainFever 3y agoOn the other hand, don't use 444.ai
- TekMol 3y agoHow can an open source company have a valuation of $1B? How do open source businesses work at all? I sometimes read about companies like these, with huge valuations and then the next day I read about some open source developer asking for donations because their project, which powers half of the internet [1], is not making him enough to pay for food. What makes the difference? Over the years, I wrote some tools for my own use, which are way better than their commercial counterparts. If I would spend a few weeks to polish one of them and open source it, it would probably gain widespread adoption. But how could I then build that into a business? [1] Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
- lgeorget 3y agoNot all projects are "business-able" I think. A nice tool with an identifiable user base, a nice UI, etc. is easier to market than a NTP library even if the latter has more probability to be critical and to get installed in billions of devices.
- blackoil 3y agoVery common way: Go Open Core, sell hosting and plugins and proprietary engines etc and if that's not enough do a coup and change license to prevent competition from providing same services.
- flarion 3y agolike any other startup. time, energy and passion. define problem/pain. talk loads w potential customers. ask them if they would pay for it. excel in customer success. find ways to scale and be found :)
- upupupandaway 3y agoOr... or... s/he could convince a VC that the startup would multiply the potential opportunity in the space the tools cover by 10x and get a really fat check for generating the right hype with the right crowd. /s
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- Roark66 3y agoIs it going to be as open as the (not-at-all)OpenAI?
- victor9000 3y agoless
- geckbench 3y ago[dead]
- Conscat 3y ago> We predict that AI 2.0 will create a platform opportunity ten times larger than the mobile internet, rewriting all software and user interfaces. I was a bit interested until I read this. If this claim is to be believed, then the company appears to be entirely out of touch with reality, and it makes claims like outperforming llama-70b seem even more incredulous.
- throwaway4736 3y agoMatt Levine once described this very well, although he did it when referring to Adam Neumann and WeWork. I’m paraphrasing, but there are a subset of people who are able to consistently and accurately to great success exploit a bubble in the VC world, by dint of exactly knowing what to say and of being able to get the meeting in the first place. Lee being able to credibly sell bullshit like the quoted claim is a feature, not a bug. It’s somewhat irrelevant if he actually believes it.
- textcortex 3y agoYep, agreed. Also somehow this AI 2.0 thing he is mentioning reminds me of web 3.0 bs. Baseless and delusional.
- upupupandaway 3y agoAt first I was angry about these grifters because they suck opportunities out of the market, leaving legitimate startups behind. But knowing what I know now, that VCs are also grifters (looking at a16z and its pump and dump crypto win) I have started rooting for the "bad guys". So may Lee attract all VC money in the world to promptly set it on fire like Adam did.
- DevX101 3y agoCurious, what was the a16z crypto dump play? I saw them pump for a few years, until the market tanked.
- deleted 3y ago
- lhl 3y agoJust an FYI,the Yi license is a custom license an is not what I would describe an "open license": https://huggingface.co/01-ai/Yi-34B/blob/main/LICENSE https://huggingface.co/01-ai/Yi-34B/blob/main/LICENSE It's non-commercial only: "If you plan to use the Yi Series Models and Derivatives for Commercial Purposes, you should contact the Licensor in advance" and "Your use of the Yi Series Models must comply with the Laws and Regulations as well as applicable legal requirements of other countries/regions, and respect social ethics and moral standards," which is all fine and good, but as defined in the terms, “Laws and Regulations” refers to the laws and administrative regulations of the mainland of the People's Republic of China. I tend to refer to this type of license as NC/China and I don't even bother poking around with those. I'll wait for the next Mistral or other Apache 2.0 model to come out. Note, for coding, DeepSeek Coder 33B is already stronger and released under a less restrictive license.
- ttflee 3y agoThe model card for Yi-34B included benchmark scores in several Chinese-oriented evaluation sets, CMMLU, C-eval and GAOKAO.
- omneity 3y agoWorth noting they include synthetic data and training other models as derivatives: > “Derivatives” refers to all modifications to Yi Series Models, work based on Yi Series Models, or any other models created or initialized by transferring the weights, parameters, activations, or output patterns of Yi Series Models to other models to achieve similar performance, including but not limited to methods that require using intermediate data representations or generating synthetic data based on Yi Series Models to train other models. This model does not seem fit at all for public use except maybe for some research. I suspect they have customers lined up or are currently prospecting/in talks, and this release is purely for marketing purposes.
- ronsor 3y agoI'm not sure how enforceable that would even be. Since the output of these models can't be copyrighted, you can't apply a license to them either. The question of whether the weights can be copyrighted is separate, but I also honestly don't think so. I think all these model weight licenses are an emperor's new clothes scenario, where everyone is too afraid to call out the obvious.
- menshiki 3y agoKai Fu Lee has so many terrible takes. Some things he says are borderline delusional.
- berserk1010 3y ago[flagged]
- HlessClaudesman 3y agoHis book AI Superpowers is frontloaded with a lot of "Ra Ra mighty China inevitably will win the AI competition" stuff. I just felt sad for him if AI nationalism is his genuine world view, and not just some party line he has to parrot to appease the commissars.
- krageon 3y agoLet's not discount folks just because they are patriotic. A lot of people (including ones you probably do respect) fall into that pit - it's like religion, just something people also do. It doesn't change anything else they achieve. That said, the license on the AI they produce is not open. Calling it open is dumb and for that a certain measure of disrespect is warranted.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Misaka-Chen 3y agoWhat is ai2.0? I have never heard this notion.
- upupupandaway 3y agoAn attempt to coin a sticky term that will be used to group companies in a way that it's easier to sell the "opportunity" to gullible (or greedy) VCs.
- visarga 3y agoMaybe it's LLMs as opposed to CNNs, LSTMs and other bespoke models, pre-2020 AI.
- re-thc 3y ago3.0 by now.
- vincnetas 3y agoWhat happened to WEB 3.0? Are we there yet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3
- mark_l_watson 3y agoPainfully, years ago I wrote a book with Web 3.0 in the title. For me that meant semantic web and linked data. I am enjoying reading this entire thread. For AI skeptics: I am not trying to talk you into anything you don’t believe, but just as an experiment, whenever you think about LLMs, appreciate how well they generalize past things they have been trained on. Peter Norvig and a friend of his recently write an article arguing that LLMs probably meet our traditional criteria for AGI. EDIT: I am aware of the recent paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00871 https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00871 that argues that LLMs have limited generalization capabilities, but I don’t agree.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- upupupandaway 3y agoThis sounds more like WeAI.
- wodenokoto 3y agoIt seems like everyone knows Kai Fu Lee. Is his name something one should recognize if you know Andrew Ng and Yang LeCun?
- geckbench 3y ago[dead]
- voz_ 3y agogrifter alert, all the alarm bells are going off on this one
- hans789 3y agoreaching HuggingFace LLM leaderboard #1 after recent ranking refresh!