Valued at $1B, Kai-Fu Lee’s LLM startup unveils open source model
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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.
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.
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!