Photo/Zhao Jiaqi (NBD)

Amidst much anticipation from the industry both domestically and internationally, OpenAI finally unveiled its latest update, GPT-4o, on May 14th. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs in China's large model race are poised to witness a moment that could bring them closer to, or even surpass, GPT-4.

On May 13th, 01.AI, a Chinese AI startup founded by Kai-fu Lee, released its Yi-Large closed-source model with 1 trillion parameters.

On the English ability leaderboard of Stanford's open-source benchmarking project AlpacaEval 2.0, the model's LC Win Rate (win rate controlling for text length error) ranks second only to OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo, while its Win Rate (win rate) tops the global list.

Lee mentioned that as the capabilities of large models from various companies enter a new phase of aiming to benchmark against GPT-4, the focus of large model evaluation is also shifting from simple general capabilities to complex reasoning abilities such as mathematics and coding. At the same time, 01.AI has already begun training its next-generation Yi-XLarge MoE model, which will aim to surpass GPT-5 in terms of performance and innovation.

However, he also mentioned that he cannot guarantee that it will necessarily surpass the most top-notch large models on the market, or by how much the gap (difference) will be, but that he will use appropriate methods to advance it rapidly. "Since we can't use 100,000 GPUs (graphics processors) to train it, we'll find other ways to achieve very good results," Lee said.

Since starting to release new large model products one after another in September last year, 01.AI now has a total of 4 products online. Lee also revealed for the first time 01.AI's specific business operations: Currently, 01.AI has nearly 10 million total users of its overseas productivity applications, and revenue is expected to exceed 100 million yuan this year. In addition, it has already practiced a preliminary way for large model 2C products to get rid of the "burn money to acquire customers" (model), verifying the subscription business model of AI-First products.

In May last year, Lee, who was over 60 years old, personally entered the arena, becoming the oldest entrepreneur in China's large model race. From investor to entrepreneur, Lee has made many changes for this. He specially registered a Douyin account and live-streamed the entire new product launch conference. "They used to invite me, but I never agreed, but now it's necessary for me," he said.

A year after the company's founding, the low-key Lee made his first public appearance with his technical team and accepted interviews from media outlets, including the National Business Daily reporter. Lee mentioned: "Large models are very expensive to train and serve, and the shortage of computing power is a collective challenge for the industry. The industry should jointly avoid falling into the irrational 'ofo-style' bleeding and burning money strategy, and allow large models to be able to use healthy and benign ROI (investment return rate) to store energy for long-distance running and rush towards China's AI 2.0 transformation." Lee said.

In just one year, from sprinting to long-distance running, from the entrepreneurial craze to commercialization, will the entrepreneurs in the field of large models be "shuffled" overnight? Lee told the National Business Daily reporter that the Chinese market is still in the process of fermentation and growth, and many large model companies have taken different routes. They have fully witnessed the process of Chinese companies growing rapidly and wildly in a new environment, so it is a bit too early to make a final conclusion at this time. He also revealed that he had already promised investors that he would not cash out for 10 years before founding 01.AI.

When asked if he would cash out in the future, Lee said: "I don't comment on other companies, I don't know the situation very well, because they also deny it. But the reason I do this is because this is my dream for more than 40 years. In my doctoral thesis application letter, I said that AGI is my dream. Today I have the opportunity to make this dream come true. This is the main motivation that drives me to work hard."

Lee also confirmed to the public that he will not cash out from 01.AI within 10 years. "When I founded 01.AI a year ago, I made a promise to investors that I would not cash out for 10 years."