01.AI Isn’t Selling Pre-Training Team to Alibaba’s Cloud Computing Arm, Founder Says

(Yicai) Jan. 7 — The founding father of 01.AI has denied reviews that Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing unit is negotiating with the Chinese language synthetic intelligence agency for its pre-training staff.

01.AI shouldn’t be promoting its pre-training staff, infrastructure, and computing sources to Alibaba, Lee Kai-Fu, who’s Google’s former China president, mentioned on WeChat yesterday. The corporate’s income exceeded CNY100 million (USD13.6 million) final 12 months, he famous, including that this 12 months will likely be vital for China’s massive language fashions.

Sources near the matter beforehand informed Yicai that Alibaba Cloud and 01.AI had agreed on a worth for the pre-training staff, with the deal involving round 60 employees devoted to mannequin pre-training. The Beijing-based AI agency’s to-business operations in China, abroad to-customer operations, or different companies weren’t included, the sources famous.

On Jan. 2, Alibaba Cloud and 01.AI mentioned the pair will hyperlink arms to determine an “Industrial Basis Mannequin Joint Laboratory” to hurry up the transition of basis mannequin expertise into sensible use and additional increase the ecosystem integration of commercial basis fashions.

The tie-up serves as a method for Alibaba Cloud to combine 01.AI’s expertise, enterprise, and expertise within the to-B fields by way of a partnership relatively than an acquisition.

A number of senior executives not too long ago left 01.AI’s pre-training staff, with its chief Huang Wenhao becoming a member of Tiktok’s Chinese language proprietor ByteDance in August, whereas core member Li Xiangang left across the identical time to return to realtor Ke Holdings.

After Huang and Li’s departure, 01.AI appointed YeLong Shen, co-author of the paper “LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Giant Language Fashions,” as chief of the pre-training staff. LoRA, quick for Low-Rank Adaptation, is a technique for fine-tuning LLMs by lowering trainable parameters whereas minimizing the lack of mannequin efficiency.

YeLong graduated from China’s Beihang College and US’ Kent State College and is predicated in North America. He has labored as a principal researcher at Microsoft’s Azure AI.

A number of members of Alibaba Cloud’s pre-training staff additionally left beforehand, with the agency desperate to discover a strategic AI chief, sources identified. The corporate has additionally persistently prioritized high-performance small fashions as a key strategic path, with LoRA being one of many vital strategies to realize its objectives, they added.

Editor: Martin Kadiev