Bots & Thoughts: AI Industry Updates (~ Nov 7, 2023)

With many AI news, startups, and trends announced every day, I wanted to start a blog series that dissects the biggest news of the week as well as news I personally find interesting and share my thoughts as a machine learning researcher.

AI scientist Kai-Fu Lee’s $1B LLM startup unveiled open source model 🚀

Valued at $1B, Kai-Fu Lee's LLM startup unveils open source model | TechCrunch

The Details:

• Announced by TechCrunch, Kai-Fu Lee has launched 01.AI, aiming to create a Chinese LLM due to China’s lack of access to OpenAI and Google’s AI technologies 👩‍🎨.
• The company’s first release, Yi-34B, is a bilingual LLM that outperforms larger models, with plans to release even bigger models in the future.
• Valued at $1 billion 💰, 01.AI has secured financing from major investors like Sinovation Ventures and Alibaba Cloud, and has grown to over 100 employees, including top AI experts from global tech firms.
• Lee’s strategy includes open-sourcing some models for societal benefit while developing proprietary models for commercial use, with an eye on monetization to support the high costs of LLM development.
• The company aims to become a thriving ecosystem for developers to create applications…