The Global War of Models

Patenting like mad and investing billions. Will this be enough for China to become a global artificial intelligence empire?

Production of silicon wafers used to make chips at the Jiangsu Azure Corp. factory, Huai'an, China, 25 March 2022

AI expert and former director at Google, Microsoft and Apple, Kai-Fu Lee could have chosen to work in any corner of the world – and yet confidently picked Beijing as the venue to develop his own business. Founded in early 2023, his startup 01.AI began operating on the down-low, only to showcase Yi-34B, an open-source Large Language Model (LLM), six months later, available to programmers in English and Chinese. It clicked immediately, surpassing leading market models in key metrics, including Meta’s Llama 2.

It’s no wonder that 01.AI has been valued at over one billion dollars within eight months of its founding. While this would not have been possible without the Chinese giant Alibaba, this statistic is highly impressive – especially given that the eyes of the world, fascinated with progress in artificial intelligence, have been fixed solely on Silicon Valley over the past year. After all, this is where OpenAI presented its model (known as ChatGPT3) in the hopes of overtaking the competition in late November 2022. The move was followed by a gush of AI-based solutions.