17 people from Tsinghua University support half of China's large-scale entrepreneurship

Original: Cheng Qian

Source: Wisdom Stuff

Zhishi reported on August 23 that in the past three months, the wave of generative AI has been full of variables, and the domestic AI large-scale model industry has also exploded:

On June 29, Meituan announced the completion of the acquisition of the AI large-scale unicorn enterprise Light Years Beyond. The AI large-scale model startup Baichuan Intelligent, founded by Sogou founder Wang Xiaochuan, released three open-source large models in succession; Yuan Jinhui, the founder of OneFlow (first-class technology), an AI large-scale model startup acquired from outside, also confirmed this week that the first-class technology team will aim at the cost of large-scale model reasoning to start a new business.

Interestingly, these protagonists who are at the focus of the domestic AI large-scale model competition - Wang Xing, founder of Meituan, Wang Huiwen, founder of Light Years Beyond, Wang Xiaochuan, founder of Sogou & Baichuan Intelligence, and Yuan Jinhui, founder of First-class Technology - all Is a student of Tsinghua University.

In the AI large-scale model competition that is in full swing, Tsinghua students can be said to have "stole" the limelight. In addition to Wang Huiwen, Wang Xiaochuan and other Internet "veteran" high-profile entry, there are also many professors from Tsinghua University and Tsinghua graduates. Into the game. According to incomplete statistics from Zhishi, there are at least 17 founders with Tsinghua background among the recently active AI large-scale startups, involving 11 companies. The entrepreneurial team of Tsinghua University seems to be supporting half of the wave of domestic AI large-scale entrepreneurship.

▲Tsinghua startups that have recently been active in the wave of large-scale models in China (organized from public information)

Daxie Entrepreneurship: In the 1990s, Tsinghua University brothers and sisters, the Internet "veteran" entered the game with a high profile

Many years later, people recalled the unprecedented moment of AI large-scale entrepreneurial boom in China: two names will definitely come to mind first, that is, Wang Huiwen and Wang Xiaochuan. Just in February and April of this year, these two Internet veterans successively announced their start-ups, pointing their swords at large models.

In addition to these commonalities, the brothers Wang Xiaochuan and Wang Huiwen graduated from Tsinghua University in 1996 and 1997.

1. Wang Huiwen: Become a unicorn in 2 months, and become the biggest hidden danger if there is no product

It was Wang Huiwen who was the first to officially announce the start-up. In mid-February, Wang Huiwen posted 5 circles of friends in 6 days, from expressing his attitude to "bringing 5 million US dollars to join the team to form a team" and posting the "AI Hero List", and finally the large-scale AI model was formed light years away .

Wang Huiwen’s entrepreneurial journey can always see Wang Xing, the founder of Meituan. In 1997, Wang Huiwen was admitted to the Department of Electronic Engineering of Tsinghua University, and became bunk brothers with Wang Xing by chance. Ironically, the reason why the two of them are inseparable is that after entering Tsinghua University, Wang Huiwen, who has excellent grades, finds that she can only be regarded as a "scumbag" among many outstanding students, so she feels sorry for Wang Xing, who has similar grades.

▲Wang Huiwen (first from the right) and Wang Xing (middle)

After graduation, the two went through several twists and turns, and finally "joined forces" in Meituan. During their graduate studies, Wang Huiwen and Wang Xing both dropped out of school to aim at the social network that was emerging in the United States at that time. After creating the Xiaonei network that was popular among college students, they fell into commercial difficulties. They then chose to sell the Xiaonei network to achieve financial freedom, and the two started their own businesses separately. In 2010, Wang Huiwen joined Meituan and joined hands with Wang Xing again. In 2020, Wang Huiwen, 42 years old and worth 12 billion yuan, chose to retire from Meituan.

This time, Wang Huiwen came out again and entered the AI model. After the official announcement of the start-up, top talents and high financing came one after another. Previously, Liu Jiang, deputy director of Beijing Zhiyuan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, and Ma Zhankai, who is known as the "father of Sogou input method", joined in, and later Wang Xing and Su Hua, the founder of Kuaishou, invested money. Two months after its establishment, it quickly jumped to unicorn light years later, with a valuation of US$1 billion.

Behind this, Wang Huiwen, who is not from a technical background, began to recruit talents intensively. In April, he completed the acquisition of a first-class technology company from Tsinghua University. The founder of this start-up is Yuan Jinhui, who studied under academician Zhang Bo, the founder of artificial intelligence in China.

After that, the business layout beyond the light years with rich capital and technology is about to be on the right track. Wang Huiwen, who has become the focus of AI large-scale entrepreneurship, was revealed to have left his post due to illness at the end of June. Later, Wang Xing entered the game. Light years away was fully acquired by Meituan.

From the current point of view, Wang Huiwen's AI large-scale model entrepreneurial journey has come to an end. Whether he will return to the "battlefield" is still unknown, but there is no official announcement on the product side after half a year of light years after its establishment. At the moment, after several twists and turns, this may have become the biggest risk for this large-scale model startup with several halos on its head.

2. Wang Xiaochuan: Hundreds of officials announced 3 large models, with a luxurious investment lineup

On the other hand, Wang Xiaochuan, who received almost the same attention as Wang Huiwen, produced three large-scale models within 4 months, and started the exploration of the commercialization of large-scale models.

The well-known 96 graduates of the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University are the first waves of the domestic Internet industry. They have participated in and witnessed every moment of China's Internet development, and they can be called the "Internet Dream Team". Wang Xiaochuan is one of them.

▲Wang Xiaochuan, Founder and CEO of Baichuan Intelligence

In 1996, Wang Xiaochuan, who won the gold medal in the International Olympic Informatics Competition, was recruited into the Computer Department of Tsinghua University, where he stayed for seven years. From computer science to biology, from the domestic youth community platform ChinaRen to Sohu, Wang Xiaochuan's technical talents have gradually expanded, but his physical space has hardly left Wudaokou. Wang Xiaochuan is also known as the "Tsinghua East Gate goalkeeper ".

Wang Xiaochuan also settled Baichuan Intelligent in Wudaokou. In April of this year, Wang Xiaochuan teamed up with former Sogou COO Ru Liyun to establish Baichuan Intelligent, officially announced the entry of large-scale models to start a business, and many old employees of the Sogou team took the initiative to apply for funding to join. According to Wang Xiaochuan when the third large-scale model was released According to the disclosure, at present, the proportion of former Sogou employees in Baichuan Intelligence accounts for 30-40%.

One month after its establishment, Baichuan Intelligence received joint investment from more than ten institutions including Tencent, Xiaomi, Kingsoft, Tsinghua University Asset Management Co., Ltd., and TAL. Such a luxurious investment lineup is rarely preceded.

In four months, Baichuan Intelligence has released a general-purpose large language model Baichuan-13B-Base with 13 billion parameters, a dialogue model Baichuan-13B-Chat and its two quantized versions of INT4/INT8, and Baichuan-53B with a scale of 53 billion parameters. Covering open source to closed source. In the next step, Wang Xiaochuan will find a super application of large models and a large model with GPT capabilities on the basis of open source of large models and based on Sogou’s previous super application experience.

▲Baichuan Large Model Demonstration Case

Both Wang Huiwen and Wang Xiaochuan were Tsinghua students who once created China's Internet. After retiring for many years, they entered the game under the wave of large models. In addition to these two Internet veterans, there are many professors and students from the Department of Tsinghua University who are particularly eye-catching in this large-scale model track filled with gunpowder.

02. Academic school: five professors lead the way, incubating multiple large-scale model startups

Tsinghua University is a well-deserved talent treasure for the domestic AI large-scale model track. The existing academic strength is in full swing, and the wave of AI large-scale model entrepreneurship led by five professors is slowly kicking off.

In the field of artificial intelligence, we have to mention the well-known name of Zhiyuan Research Institute. In 2018, Zhiyuan Research Institute was officially established, bringing together top talents from top universities and companies in the artificial intelligence industry such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Baidu, and ByteDance.

When OpenAI's GPT-3 was released, Zhiyuan Research Institute took the lead in launching the large-scale model project. Well-known AI scholars from Tsinghua University such as Tang Jie, Liu Zhiyuan, Huang Minlie, Yang Zhilin, etc. joined in, and they jointly formed the research and development team of the later Wudao large-scale model. .

These AI giants have also become the core force in this wave of large-scale model entrepreneurship.

1. Tang Jie: The core members have participated in the research and development of well-known large-scale models, and the financing has been soft

Zhipu AI, Zhiyuan Research Institute, Dark Side of the Moon, and Cycle Intelligence, these companies at the center of the large-scale model boom, all have a close relationship with Tang Jie, a professor of computer science at Tsinghua University.

Professor Tang Jie has a halo. He is not only the leader of the Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (KEG) of the Computer Department of Tsinghua University, but also the academic vice president of Zhiyuan Research Institute and the leader of the Enlightenment Project.

▲Tang Jie (Source: Tsinghua University)

In fact, at the beginning, Tang Jie did not believe that machine intelligence would surpass humans. His main research directions were data mining and knowledge engineering. The emergence of large-scale pre-trained models made him see the possibility of machine intelligence surpassing humans.

In 2020, OpenAI threw out GPT-3, which stirred up the entire artificial intelligence industry. Subsequently, in October 2020, Zhiyuan Research Institute took the lead in determining the strategic direction of large-scale model research. Tang Jie, then vice president of Zhiyuan, led the team to release the Enlightenment 1.0 and 2.0 models in 2021. At the same time, Enlightenment 2.0 set a world record, the first in China and the largest in the world, with a trillion-level parameter scale.

At the same time, most of the core team of Zhipu AI incubated by KEG Labs are the R&D personnel of Wudao large model. billion yuan. At present, Zhipu AI Chinese-English bilingual open source model ChatGLM, code generation model CodeGeeX and other large models and application product matrix.

In addition to Tang Jie himself, his famous and proud student Yang Zhilin also entered the large-scale model. Yang Zhilin, who graduated from Tsinghua University, studied under the AI experts of Apple and Google at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States. On June 12, Yang Zhilin's new start-up company, the dark side of the moon, made his debut, and immediately received investment from Sequoia and Zhenge after its establishment, with a market valuation of US$300 million. However, the halo above Yang Zhilin's head is far more than that. As early as 2016, Yang Zhilin founded the circular intelligence focusing on natural language understanding, and also participated in the research and development of Huawei's Pangu model.

Among the other three co-founders of The Dark Side of the Moon, Zhang Yutao and Zhou Xinyu also graduated from Tsinghua University. Zhang Yutao and Yang Zhilin are both students of Tang Jie.

2. Sun Maosong: From information processing to legal large models, the number of start-ups and the types of ventures are in the forefront

Sun Maosong, a professor at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Tsinghua University, is the head of the Natural Language Processing and Social Humanities Computing Laboratory (THUNLP), and Liu Zhiyuan learned from Sun Maosong. Compared with Professor Tang Jie, the team of Sun Maosong and Liu Zhiyuan has more start-up companies, and the application fields involved are also richer.

▲Sun Maosong (left) Liu Zhiyuan (right)

Shenyan Technology builds a Chinese information processing engine based on the pre-trained model, Facewall Intelligence focuses on the core technology of the basic large model, and Power Law Intelligence applies natural language processing to the law. Previously, Wang Huiwen also rumored that he would acquire Shenyan Technology and Facewall Smart, but these acquisition rumors finally disappeared.

In 2021, a reverse dictionary called WantWords suddenly became popular on social platforms, attracting about 300,000 users in two or three weeks. The developer of this application is the founding team of Shenyan Technology. WantWords, based on deep learning, can help people find words based on semantic descriptions, and this product has also helped Qi Fanchao to make a name for itself.

▲WantWords Reverse Dictionary Homepage

Qi Fanchao, who had already had entrepreneurial ideas, graduated in 2022 and established Shenyan Technology. Sun Maosong served as the chief scientist, and the core team of Shenyan Technology all have PhD backgrounds from Tsinghua University. Since its establishment, Shenyan Technology has completed three rounds of financing, and Tencent and TAL are listed in the latest round of financing. Although the exact funding amount has not been disclosed, its valuation is rumored to have reached $100 million after the second round of funding was completed.

Another company that was rumored to be acquired, Fianbi Smart, whose founder, Zeng Guoyang, is a student of Liu Zhiyuan, and Liu Zhiyuan is also the co-founder. Fianbi Smart has completed a seed round of financing of nearly 10 million yuan, and previously launched CPM-Live 10 billion Chinese large-scale model live training project.

In April of this year, Zhihu announced that it had jointly developed “Zhihaitu AI” with Facewall Smart and injected tens of millions of RMB into it, which also broke the rumors that Facewall Smart had been acquired. With the blessing of multiple factors such as technology, talents, capital, applications, and data, the large model of Fianbi Intelligence has been applied on a large scale in the Zhihu application.

In addition to these two start-ups, there is also Power-Law Intelligence founded by Tu Cunchao, a Ph.D. in the Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Department of Computer Science, Tsinghua University. This company focuses on the combination of natural language processing technology and the legal field. In June this year, Powerlaw Intelligence and Zhipu AI jointly released the legal vertical large model PowerLawGLM based on the Chinese 100 billion large model.

3. Huang Minlie: Aim at the specific scene of psychological counseling, and make a Chinese version of Character AI

Huang Minlie, a tenured professor of the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University who also participated in the research and development of the Enlightenment model, aimed at specific application scenarios in the early days of his business.

In 2021, Professor Huang Minlie founded Lingxin Intelligent. Most of its founding teams came from scientific research institutes of universities such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, and Beijing Normal University. Up to now, Lingxin Intelligent has completed three rounds of financing. The investment institutions include Tsinghua Department Zhipu Huazhang, etc., which disclosed the specific financing is the tens of millions of angel + round financing completed in December last year.

▲Huang Minlie, tenured professor of the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University (Source: Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University)

In the early days of its establishment, Professor Huang Minlie focused on enabling artificial intelligence to provide disease diagnosis and personalized intervention programs for patients with mental sub-health. The idea of this entrepreneurial goal comes from the story of Professor Huang Minlie and his student suffering from depression.

In July this year, Lingxin Intelligent released the super-anthropomorphic large model CharacterGLM, which provides AI images of thousands of people and faces to accompany users and chat with users. Product AiU.

Different from the start-up companies targeting OpenAI in this wave of large-scale models, Lingxin Intelligence has previously revealed that what they want to do is "Character AI in China". The biggest feature of Character AI is to allow users to create personalized AI characters for interaction. .

4. Zhu Jun: Focus on multi-modal large models, and get investment from Ant and Baidu Venture Capital

Zhu Jun, a professor of the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University and director of the Basic Theory Research Center of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Tsinghua University, is also the latest professor of the Tsinghua Department. Shengshu Technology was established in March this year. Most of its core team comes from the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Tsinghua University. It mainly creates multi-modal general-purpose large models.

▲Zhu Jun, Professor of Computer Science Department of Tsinghua University and Director of the Basic Theory Research Center of Tsinghua University Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (Source: Beijing Zhiyuan Conference official website)

Professor Zhu Jun's first venture can be traced back to 2018, when RealAI, which focused on improving the security of artificial intelligence, was established, focusing on improving the security of artificial intelligence.

Shengshu Technology was hatched by Ruilai Wisdom. Since its establishment, it has received two rounds of investment. In June this year, it received nearly 100 million yuan in financing from Ant Group, BV Baidu Ventures, etc., and in August this year it received an exclusive investment from Jinqiu Fund Invested tens of millions of RMB.

Tang Jiayu, the co-founder and CEO of Shengshu Technology, is also a student of Professor Sun Maosong. He said in an interview that the image generation effect of the large model currently trained by Shengshu Technology has surpassed Stable Diffusion, and is expected to surpass Midjourmy within this year.

5. Zhou Bowen: For consumer business, self-developed tens of billions of vertical large models

The situation of the last one is slightly different from the above-mentioned professors. Zhou Bowen, chair professor of Tsinghua University Huiyan, tenured professor of the Department of Electronic Engineering of Tsinghua University, and director of the Collaborative Interactive Intelligence Research Center of the Department of Electronics of Tsinghua University, is an AI expert returning to the academic world typical representative.

From IBM to JD.com, Zhou Bowen has been engaged in the research of basic theories and core technologies of artificial intelligence for 20 years. Since joining IBM in 2003, he has served several important technical and management positions in large-scale projects. He also led the development of the IBM Watson Group artificial intelligence platform as the chief scientist of the IBM Watson Group. After joining JD in 2017, he has become an important figure in promoting the development of JD AI and JD Cloud.

▲Hui Yan Chair Professor of Tsinghua University, Tenured Professor of the Department of Electronic Engineering of Tsinghua University, Zhou Bowen, Director of the Collaborative Interactive Intelligence Research Center of the Department of Electronics of Tsinghua University (Source: Qiming Venture Partners)

In 2021, after he resigned from JD.com, in mid-2022, Tsinghua University officially announced the appointment of Zhou Bowen.

In addition to returning to academia, Zhou Bowen also aimed at the path of AI entrepreneurship. In 2021, Lianyuan Technology was established. The company's core products are aimed at the consumer industry, providing an enterprise-level multi-round dialogue platform ProductGPT based on a large model of commodity supply chain. Moreover, the company's information shows that this AI large model is self-developed, with a parameter scale of tens of billions, which can make the large model better at understanding people and products on the basis of general-purpose capabilities.

The academic strength of Tsinghua University has stood on the stage of large-scale entrepreneurship. Not only Tsinghua professors end up starting businesses, but also teacher-student partners enter the game. In fact, in the tide of entrepreneurship in China, the Tsinghua Gang has supported half of the industry more than once, and this is inseparable from the forward-looking layout of Tsinghua University in the field of artificial intelligence in the last century.

03. Catching up from zero, Tsinghua University supports half of the large model business

Tsinghua University, a university that gathers many top talents in China, is also the place where China's artificial intelligence technology was born.

Compared with the current popularity, the term "artificial intelligence" was unfamiliar to domestic professionals more than 40 years ago. In 1978, artificial intelligence appeared in Tsinghua University for the first time. The Department of Automatic Control was renamed the Department of Computer Technology and Application. The internal artificial intelligence and intelligent control teaching and research group was established, which opened the prelude to the teaching of artificial intelligence.

Tsinghua University has also created many firsts in the field of artificial intelligence in the country. In 1978, it recruited the first batch of master students; in 1983, it established the first intelligent robot laboratory; Academic papers; won the first important international award in the field of artificial intelligence in 1984; graduated the first doctoral student in the field of artificial intelligence in 1987; established the country's first state key laboratory on artificial intelligence "intelligent technology and systems" in 1990 "; In 2005, the "Tsinghua University Computer Science Laboratory" was established, which is the "Yao Class" known to everyone in the field of artificial intelligence; in 2018, an interdisciplinary research institution "Tsinghua University Artificial Intelligence Research Institute" was established...

my country is gradually catching up with the world's leading level in the field of artificial intelligence and occupying a place.

However, a few words still cannot fully summarize the difficulty of Tsinghua University from being blank to now being fruitful. In the 1970s, research on biological control and pattern recognition in the field of artificial intelligence in China started, but due to the influence of the political environment, artificial intelligence research has stagnated to a certain extent.

In order to have a more comprehensive and systematic understanding of the field of artificial intelligence, researchers who have nowhere to go to school in China went to the United States to study after the reform and opening up. Zhang Bo, who is in his 40s, is one of this group of foreign students. He went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study as a visiting scholar. Learning, Huang Changning, the founder of domestic NLP research, visited Yale University for a period of one year. And they have all become important founders and promoters of my country's artificial intelligence industry.

▲Speech by Academician Zhang Bo at the 60th Anniversary of the Department of Computer Science (Source: Tsinghua University)

In general, my country's artificial intelligence research started more than 20 years later than foreign countries, and has experienced a development process from scratch, from weak to strong. Today, the development of the domestic artificial intelligence industry is almost on the same starting line as other countries. The spirit of exploration and truth-seeking for cutting-edge technology is moving from the ivory tower to the training ground and growing rapidly.

04. Conclusion: Tsinghua Entrepreneurship Gang is ready to go

Tsinghua University can be regarded as one of the origins of artificial intelligence research in China. Under this new wave of artificial intelligence, Tsinghua University is undoubtedly placed with high hopes.

In addition to the rapid entrepreneurial momentum, the capital market also chose to bet heavily on Tsinghua’s entrepreneurial team. In April, Shenyan Technology’s latest valuation reached 100 million US dollars after the completion of a new round of financing. In June, Shengshu Technology completed nearly 100 million yuan in angel round financing. Tencent was revealed to have invested 50 million US dollars away from light years in June this year...

Today, the wave of large-scale model entrepreneurship has gradually calmed down. Many Tsinghua-based start-ups have competed to officially announce the results of large-scale models and devote themselves to the implementation of large-scale model applications. A new round of competition among Chinese large-scale model entrepreneurs has begun and is becoming more and more intense.

Today, the advantages of Tsinghua University have gradually become prominent. It has not only become an arsenal of talents in the field of large-scale models, but also occupies half of the domestic wave of large-scale model entrepreneurship.

Reference material: Speech for the 60th Anniversary of the Establishment of the Department of Computer Science "Growing Together with the Department of Computer Science"