The Beijing-based startup founded by Lee, an artificial intelligence pioneer, released its large language model, Yi-34B, in Chinese and English. Lee did not disclose how much 01.AI has raised, but said it’s received financing from Alibaba Group’s cloud unit and Sinovation Ventures, where Lee is founder and CEO. (Bloomberg, TechCrunch)

Talking point: 01.AI reached a unicorn valuation less than eight months after its launch. Its product already rivals similar models like Meta’s Llama 2, according to LLM leaderboards maintained by Hugging Face. Founder Lee was an early AI scholar in the 1980s and went on to work at Google, Microsoft and Apple; he is also the author of AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order and AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future. Lee told Bloomberg that the firm had to borrow money—“bet the farm”—and stockpile chips after the U.S. restricted semiconductor exports to China, including chips that are key to powering AI models. Meanwhile, San Francisco-based OpenAI, which sparked a frenzy of interest in generative AI with ChatGPT, released a new GPT-4 “Turbo” version at its first-ever developer conference Monday.