01.AI

Chinese artificial intelligence company October 2024 Beijing Lingyi Wanwu Information Technology Co., Ltd. 01.AI zh-CN 零一万物 01.AI.png 260px Private 2023 03 y Beijing, China Kai-Fu Lee Kai-Fu Lee (CEO) 100+ (2023) Information technology Yi-34BYi-CoderYi-Lightning https://www.01.ai/ 01.ai 01.AI (Língyī Wànwù 零一万物) is an artificial intelligence (AI) company based in Beijing, China. It focuses on developing open source products. It is one of China's 6 "AI Tigers".10 March 2025 Meet the 'Six Tigers' that dominate China's AI industry https://qz.com/china-six-tigers-ai-startup-zhipu-moonshot-minimax-01ai-1851768509 2025-09-13 Quartz Background 01.AI was founded in March 2023 by former Microsoft and Google executive and Sinovation Ventures co-founder Kai-Fu Lee.Rai Saritha 5 November 2023 AI Pioneer Kai-Fu Lee Builds $1 Billion Startup in Eight Months https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-05/kai-fu-lee-s-open-source-01-ai-bests-llama-2-according-to-hugging-face 27 October 2024 Bloomberg News 27 June 2024 https://web.archive.org/web/20240627203818/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-05/kai-fu-lee-s-open-source-01-ai-bests-llama-2-according-to-hugging-face live The Chinese name of 01.AI means "zero-one, everything", alluding to a passage from the Taoist text Tao Te Ching.Knight Will 23 January 2023 This Chinese Startup Is Winning the Open Source AI Race https://www.wired.com/story/chinese-startup-01-ai-is-winning-the-open-source-ai-race/ 27 October 2024 Wired en-US 1059-1028 12 November 2024 https://web.archive.org/web/20241112233122/https://www.wired.com/story/chinese-startup-01-ai-is-winning-the-open-source-ai-race/ live External backers of 01.AI include Alibaba Group and Xiaomi.Kao Kimberley 23 August 2024 Chips or Not, Chinese AI Pushes Ahead https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chips-or-not-chinese-ai-pushes-ahead-31034e3d The Wall Street Journal 27 October 2024 29 September 2024 https://web.archive.org/web/20240929003843/https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chips-or-not-chinese-ai-pushes-ahead-31034e3d live Due to US export controls on semiconductors, 01.AI began amassing the semiconductors earlier in the year and even borrowed money from Sinovation Ventures to fund the purchases. Due to its low supply of chips, 01.AI developed more efficient AI infrastructure and inference engines to train its AI. Its chip-cluster failure rate was lower than industry average. In June 2023, 01.AI commenced operations. 01.AI opted to build an open source model because the vast majority of AI developers cannot afford or do not require the largest and most expensive models. However, it planned to develop proprietary models for customers in the future. In November 2023, within eight months of launching 01.AI obtained a valuation over $1 billion giving it unicorn status. The company had a team of over 100 employees. In October 2024, it was reported that 01.AI was reducing costs by using strategies such as focusing on smaller data sets to train AI models and hiring cheaper engineers.Olcott Eleanor 19 October 2024 Chinese AI groups get creative to drive down cost of models https://www.ft.com/content/0a6da1bb-2bda-40f3-9645-97877eb0947c Financial Times In November 2024, it was reported that 01.AI trained its AI models with just 2,000 GPUs. The cost was $3 million compared to OpenAI's $80–100 million.Shilov Anton 14 November 2024 Chinese company trained GPT-4 rival with just 2,000 GPUs — 01.ai spent $3M compared to OpenAI's $80M to $100M https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/chinese-company-trained-gpt-4-rival-with-just-2-000-gpus-01-ai-spent-usd3m-compared-to-openais-usd80m-to-usd100m 2024-11-21 Tom's Hardware 19 November 2024 https://web.archive.org/web/20241119162634/https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/chinese-company-trained-gpt-4-rival-with-just-2-000-gpus-01-ai-spent-usd3m-compared-to-openais-usd80m-to-usd100m live In January 2025, Lee denied rumours that 01.AI was negotiating to sell its pre-training team to Alibaba Cloud.Jiang Ben 7 January 2025 Chinese start-up 01.AI founder Lee Kai-fu denies asset sale to Alibaba Cloud https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3293791/chinese-start-01ai-founder-lee-kai-fu-denies-rumours-asset-sale-alibaba 2025-01-19 South China Morning Post In March 2025, 01.AI stopped "pre-training" large language models to focus on selling tailored AI business solutions using DeepSeek's models.Olcott Eleanor 22 March 2025 Chinese AI start-ups overhaul business models after DeepSeek’s success https://www.ft.com/content/c19f3988-45d7-4a81-854d-9ba0d71812fe Financial Times Products Yi Yi is an open source large language model (LLM). In November 2023, Yi-34B was launched and made available to developers around the world in Chinese and English. Its name comes from the 34 billion parameters used in training. On key metrics it outperformed other open-source models such as Meta AI's Llama 2. Hugging Face ranked it first for what's known as pre-trained base LLMs. In September 2024, Yi-Coder was launched. It is a coding assistant that works across 52 programming languages. It is available in 9 billion and 1.5 billion parameter versions. A noted feature is its 128,000 token context length, allowing it to process massive code snippets.Nuñez Michael 5 September 2024 Yi-Coder: The open-source AI that wants to be your coding buddy https://venturebeat.com/ai/yi-coder-the-open-source-ai-that-wants-to-be-your-coding-buddy/ 27 October 2024 VentureBeat en-US 21 November 2024 https://web.archive.org/web/20241121082010/https://venturebeat.com/ai/yi-coder-the-open-source-ai-that-wants-to-be-your-coding-buddy/ live In October 2024, Yi-Lightning was released. In a ranking released by researchers at UC Berkeley SkyLab and LMSYS, it came joint third among LLM companies alongside x.AI's Grok-2, but behind OpenAI and Google. The cost for inference at Yi-Lightning is 14 cents per million tokens, compared with 26 cents for OpenAI's smaller model GPT o1-mini. Wanzhi In May 2024, 01.AI launched Wanzhi, a free productivity assistant that is said to be comparable to Microsoft Copilot. It has versions in Chinese and English.Rai Saritha 13 May 2024 AI Pioneer Kai-Fu Lee Aims to Bring China Its ChatGPT Moment https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-13/ai-pioneer-kai-fu-lee-aims-to-bring-china-its-chatgpt-moment 27 October 2024 Bloomberg News See also Sinovation Ventures Six AI tigers Baichuan MiniMax (company) Moonshot AI StepFun Zhipu AI References External links http://www.01.ai Category:2023 establishments in China Category:2023 in artificial intelligence Category:Artificial intelligence companies Category:Artificial intelligence industry in China