Person
Kai-Fu Lee
Kai-Fu Lee is the founder and chief executive of 01.AI, the Beijing large-model startup behind the open-weight Yi series, which he launched in 2023. A Taiwanese-American computer scientist, he earned a PhD in speech recognition at Carnegie Mellon, founded Microsoft Research Asia, led Google China from 2005 to 2009, and chairs the venture firm Sinovation Ventures.
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- Labs & people 1
- Open weights & ecosystem 1
- Models & capabilities 1
01.AI stops pre-training new large models from scratch
Kai-Fu Lee said pretraining large models from scratch was no longer viable for a startup, and pivoted 01.AI toward fine-tuning DeepSeek and Qwen for enterprise clients.
Labs & people
01.AI open-sources Yi-6B and Yi-34B
Kai-Fu Lee's 01.AI released its first open-weight models, which it said outperformed larger Llama 2 and Falcon models.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities