[HN Gopher] Kai Fu Lee's New AI Company: Yi-Open Source
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Kai Fu Lee's New AI Company: Yi-Open Source
Author : mark_l_watson
Score : 140 points
Date : 2023-11-06 03:37 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.01.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.01.ai)
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| The valuation is mentioned this TechCrunch article as well:
|
| 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 wrote:
| What was his thesis about ?
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| You inspire me.
| echelon wrote:
| What is up with all of these {number}.ai companies?
|
| 01.ai
|
| 11.ai
|
| 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 wrote:
| Before 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 wrote:
| 420.ai, 69.ai or 666.ai are much worse.
| staunton wrote:
| Shh, Elon might get some ideas...
| simion314 wrote:
| made me laugh, thinking that next Elon domain would be
| xxx.xxx to max the X.
| dheera wrote:
| In Chinese, 666 is a very good number.
|
| 6 sounds like the character Liu 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 wrote:
| On the other hand, don't use 444.ai
| Yoric wrote:
| Are you telling me that there isn't already a 69.ai working
| on deepfake porns? I'd be surprised.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Number domain names seem to be popular in countries that don't
| use the latin alphabet - ie China or Japan.
|
| 01.ai is pretty cool name and domain ... for sure beats grok or
| calling something open when it is actually closed.
| mmahemoff wrote:
| China and Japan also have numerical stock tickers, e.g.
| Sony's ticker 6758 instead of e.g. SONY.
|
| I guess numeric IDs like that were a consequence of early
| tech making it hard to deal with more complex character sets
| ... maybe the association lives on in those cultures?
|
| There's also deeper associations with numbers like 8
| representing luck, 4 meaning death etc.
| timfsu wrote:
| Another reason number domains are popular in Asia is that
| they are much easier to type, especially historically on
| mobile
| astrange wrote:
| Number domains are relatively common in China because you can
| easily make Chinese language puns with them.
|
| (I don't know what this one means, but it probably is one.)
| alisonatwork wrote:
| I suppose you can pronounce 01 as Ling Yi (zero one), but
| also Ling Yi (another), so 01.ai could be read as "another
| AI".
|
| Seem like the Chinese name of the company is Ling Yi Mo Wu
| which could translate as "Zero One All Things" - not a bad
| name for a tech company.
| astrange wrote:
| Clearly it's either named after the Peter Thiel book or the
| song from Love Live.
| gwervc wrote:
| Look at the name of the company: Yi. Seems congruent then to
| use 1, pronunced yi in Chinese, as a domain name.
| TekMol wrote:
| How 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/
| lgeorget wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| Very 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 wrote:
| like 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 wrote:
| Or... 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
| flarion wrote:
| doesn't work w/o traction.
| bman_kg wrote:
| the visual you linked makes perfect sense, wonder how many
| companies are like that...
| imjonse wrote:
| In this case being open source is a nice feature, but not the
| main one the business is built around. If you have terabytes of
| data and thousands of GPUs to train on plus the talent to work
| on it you have a clear advantage over many other possible
| competitors, even if you give them the source. This is not
| nearly comparable to building yet another open source todo app
| or analytics dashboard in JS.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| It is the price equity is being raised at.
|
| OpenAI is at 80B.
| pierrefermat1 wrote:
| You could spend sometime looking into the business models of
| Elasticsearch/Docker. Albeit not successful in some eyes as
| they are exactly profit printing, but they have indeed raised
| enough to be unicorn status.
| thibo_skabgia wrote:
| Listed OSS business models here if useful:
| https://github.com/anhtho-lago/awesome-opensource-company#bu...
|
| Also, the comments here were interesting:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37682684
| Roark66 wrote:
| Is it going to be as open as the (not-at-all)OpenAI?
| victor9000 wrote:
| less
| Conscat wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Matt 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 wrote:
| Yep, agreed. Also somehow this AI 2.0 thing he is mentioning
| reminds me of web 3.0 bs. Baseless and delusional.
| upupupandaway wrote:
| At 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 wrote:
| Curious, what was the a16z crypto dump play? I saw them
| pump for a few years, until the market tanked.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| What do you find offence with? Hip speech and yawn-2.0-s aside,
| I find the claim entirely defendable, given, of course, a
| certain set of assumptions in this very new and uncertain
| space.
| upupupandaway wrote:
| How is it defendable? How do you defend 10x? What about 11x?
| Why not 3.5x? This is complete bullshit.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > How is it defendable? How do you defend 10x?
|
| Uncertainty. Given incomplete information it is common
| practice to make assumptions about things to give us some
| starting point from which to act. In this context a round
| integer value pretty much implies: They are estimating, and
| they might be completely off.
|
| I guess you could say, "Instead of making assumptions with
| uncertainty, let's not assume anything", but that makes
| progress in new and uncertain areas really hard.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| It's a common and bad practice because quantitative
| language belongs in the domain of _risk_ , not
| uncertainty. Two very different things. Risk is the world
| of stationary laws and empirical data. Fluid markets,
| mortality stats, that kind of thing. The "10x AI
| productivity boost" is about as real as the "10x
| engineer", that's to say, the PR department made it up.
| It's just vibes, but it's a symptom of a culture that
| unduly reveres anything that sounds "mathy".
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| I think it's pedantic argument. Obviously he meant that
| his bet is the future is something and willing to work
| for it. No need to scratch your head. 10x is not maths
| 10x and no one thinks it is literally 10.0x.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm entirely ready to believe AI will soon write all apps and
| UI. I don't see such rewrites being a x10 market opportunity,
| given there's already "an app for that" even when there
| shouldn't be.
| logicchains wrote:
| He doesn't mean AI will rewrite the apps, he means the
| apps/their UIs will be rewritten to use natural language
| input.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I thought he meant that more interfaces will be designed
| to be used by AI.
| jprete wrote:
| If three of you have such substantially different
| interpretations of the text, then it's almost certainly
| bullshit.
| dboreham wrote:
| > He doesn't mean AI will rewrite the apps
|
| <puts lollipop away>
| echelon wrote:
| He means that a world that requires engineers for most
| things vs. a world that doesn't is a very different world.
|
| If your average joe on the street can automate their own
| random business task, that's a very different world than
| the one we have today.
|
| This is totally a 10x opportunity if it pans out. Maybe
| even bigger.
|
| If it pans out.
| T-A wrote:
| Kai-Fu Lee is (among other things) a SciFi author. Check out
| "AI 2041" to see what he has in mind:
|
| https://www.space.com/artificial-intelligence-anthology-book...
| m3kw9 wrote:
| If they were serious they would have a specific number rather
| than exactly 10. This is for investment attraction
| lhl wrote:
| Just 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| The model card for Yi-34B included benchmark scores in several
| Chinese-oriented evaluation sets, CMMLU, C-eval and GAOKAO.
| omneity wrote:
| Worth 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 wrote:
| I'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.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Yeah, getting tired of licences like this and stability AI
| claiming to be open source when they clearly aren't.
| menshiki wrote:
| Kai Fu Lee has so many terrible takes. Some things he says are
| borderline delusional.
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| His 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 wrote:
| Let'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.
| Misaka-Chen wrote:
| What is ai2.0? I have never heard this notion.
| upupupandaway wrote:
| An 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 wrote:
| Maybe it's LLMs as opposed to CNNs, LSTMs and other bespoke
| models, pre-2020 AI.
| re-thc wrote:
| 3.0 by now.
| vincnetas wrote:
| What happened to WEB 3.0? Are we there yet?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Painfully, 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 that argues that LLMs have
| limited generalization capabilities, but I don't agree.
| upupupandaway wrote:
| This sounds more like WeAI.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| It seems like everyone knows Kai Fu Lee. Is his name something
| one should recognize if you know Andrew Ng and Yang LeCun?
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