Kai Fu Lee's New AI Company: Yi-Open Source
01.ai
01.ai
It's non-commercial only: "If you plan to use the Yi Series Models and Derivatives for Commercial Purposes, you should contact the Licensor in advance" and "Your use of the Yi Series Models must comply with the Laws and Regulations as well as applicable legal requirements of other countries/regions, and respect social ethics and moral standards," which is all fine and good, but as defined in the terms, “Laws and Regulations” refers to the laws and administrative regulations of the mainland of the People's Republic of China.
I tend to refer to this type of license as NC/China and I don't even bother poking around with those. I'll wait for the next Mistral or other Apache 2.0 model to come out.
Note, for coding, DeepSeek Coder 33B is already stronger and released under a less restrictive license.
> “Derivatives” refers to all modifications to Yi Series Models, work based on Yi Series Models, or any other models created or initialized by transferring the weights, parameters, activations, or output patterns of Yi Series Models to other models to achieve similar performance, including but not limited to methods that require using intermediate data representations or generating synthetic data based on Yi Series Models to train other models.
This model does not seem fit at all for public use except maybe for some research. I suspect they have customers lined up or are currently prospecting/in talks, and this release is purely for marketing purposes.
The question of whether the weights can be copyrighted is separate, but I also honestly don't think so. I think all these model weight licenses are an emperor's new clothes scenario, where everyone is too afraid to call out the obvious.
I was a bit interested until I read this. If this claim is to be believed, then the company appears to be entirely out of touch with reality, and it makes claims like outperforming llama-70b seem even more incredulous.
Lee being able to credibly sell bullshit like the quoted claim is a feature, not a bug. It’s somewhat irrelevant if he actually believes it.
<puts lollipop away>
What's the meme/figure of speech here?
If your average joe on the street can automate their own random business task, that's a very different world than the one we have today.
This is totally a 10x opportunity if it pans out. Maybe even bigger.
If it pans out.
Uncertainty. Given incomplete information it is common practice to make assumptions about things to give us some starting point from which to act. In this context a round integer value pretty much implies: They are estimating, and they might be completely off.
I guess you could say, "Instead of making assumptions with uncertainty, let's not assume anything", but that makes progress in new and uncertain areas really hard.
https://www.space.com/artificial-intelligence-anthology-book...
That said, the license on the AI they produce is not open. Calling it open is dumb and for that a certain measure of disrespect is warranted.
I have always been a fan - I bought his PhD Thesis to read about 40 years ago. Kai Fu Lee has had an interesting career!
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/05/valued-at-1b-kai-fu-lees-l...
Valued at $1B, Kai-Fu Lee’s LLM startup unveils open source model
…
The startup’s ability to commence model training quickly is no doubt an outcome of its smooth fundraising, which is critical to securing top-tier talent and AI processors. While declining to disclose how much 01.AI has raised, Lee said it’s valued at $1 billion after receiving financing from Sinovation Ventures, Alibaba Cloud and other undisclosed investors.
In the early part of my career (first 20 years) I concentrated on tackling very difficult problems wherever I worked, accepting some failures and some successes. Reading his thesis was important to me because it gave me a feeling for trying to solve hard problems in a low resource environment (although I did have a Lisp Machine, access to a Connection Machine and a Butterfly Machine - so not terribly resource poor!)
For what it’s worth: I am in my 70s, still waste deep in AI tech, and I still look for a few people to follow to get inspired.
How do open source businesses work at all? I sometimes read about companies like these, with huge valuations and then the next day I read about some open source developer asking for donations because their project, which powers half of the internet [1], is not making him enough to pay for food. What makes the difference?
Over the years, I wrote some tools for my own use, which are way better than their commercial counterparts. If I would spend a few weeks to polish one of them and open source it, it would probably gain widespread adoption. But how could I then build that into a business?
[1] Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/
Also, the comments here were interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37682684
/s
OpenAI is at 80B.
I am enjoying reading this entire thread. For AI skeptics: I am not trying to talk you into anything you don’t believe, but just as an experiment, whenever you think about LLMs, appreciate how well they generalize past things they have been trained on. Peter Norvig and a friend of his recently write an article arguing that LLMs probably meet our traditional criteria for AGI.
EDIT: I am aware of the recent paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00871 that argues that LLMs have limited generalization capabilities, but I don’t agree.
01.ai
11.ai
https://twelvelabs.io (couldn't get 12.ai, huh?)
There are about a half dozen more.
I'm laughing at the domain squatter that bought 900.ai, 99999.ai, and 1234567.ai
This has to be the worst possible thing to name your company.
01.ai is pretty cool name and domain … for sure beats grok or calling something open when it is actually closed.
I guess numeric IDs like that were a consequence of early tech making it hard to deal with more complex character sets ... maybe the association lives on in those cultures?
There's also deeper associations with numbers like 8 representing luck, 4 meaning death etc.
(I don't know what this one means, but it probably is one.)
Seem like the Chinese name of the company is 零一万物 which could translate as "Zero One All Things" - not a bad name for a tech company.
6 sounds like the character 溜 which technically means something like smooth flowing but is used to compliment someone's well-practiced skills.
"666" is often said when someone does something impressive and smoothly. Like if someone double-flips a pancake and it lands perfectly, that's the kind of situation you'd say "666" to compliment them.