01 .AI

🔎 China’s answer to OpenAI: In March 2023, Kai-Fu Lee (former head of Google China and a Microsoft VP) founded 01.AI in Beijing, positioning it as a more open, developer-friendly countermodel to OpenAI—less black box, more accessible models and practical tools.

The impetus, he says, was his criticism that despite its name, OpenAI has become increasingly “not open” and more proprietary. For example, with GPT-4, OpenAI did not publish details about its architecture or training.

🦄 Unicorn in no time: By November 2023, the startup had already reached a valuation of over $1 billion. No Chinese AI company has ever achieved unicorn status this fast.

📊 Quality over quantity: According to Lee, in the era of “AI 2.0,” a model’s strength is determined not by the size and volume of its data, but by the quality it’s built on. In tests, his model has outperformed Meta’s LLaMA 2, among others.

👉 Lesson learned: Sometimes successful innovation doesn’t come from imitation but—at least in Kai-Fu Lee’s case—from disappointment.