Author: Brother in the end.
Just when OpenAI's SORA exploded and Google's Gemini was released, domestic large-scale model companies began to fall before the dawn of commercialization.
On February 21, Emotibot, a well-known AI start-up, suddenly announced that it had stopped production for 6 months due to the reduction in business demand, which brought serious cash flow pressure and challenges to the company.
Emotibot is an AI company with some origins, founded in 2015 by Jian Renxian, former vice president of Microsoft (Asia) Internet Engineering Institute, and claims to be a "multimodal emotion recognition model" independently developed by Emotibot through human-computer interaction technology of text, image and voice.
Brother Whale also visited the company's booth at the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. Unexpectedly, 6 months later, the company entered a state of "shock".
The highlight moment of Emotibot
In Caohejing, Shanghai, many artificial intelligence innovation companies are located here. Well-known AI companies such as ByteDance, SenseTime, Transwarp, and Emotibot gather here. Emotibot is one of the companies that has developed well.
From the perspective of the financing process, there are more than 100 million rounds of financing almost every year, with a total of 100 million US dollars + 400 million yuan, so that the company has more than 1 billion yuan in financing alone.
Emotibot has developed a series of NLP technology platforms, such as BOT Factory, Knowledge Factory, Emoti Coach, etc. Based on these technology platforms, Emotibot has also launched a series of products, which have been used by seven or eight hundred customers from banking, insurance, manufacturing, consumption and other industries.
Realizing early on that the era of large models is coming, in 2023, Emotibot released a 1+4 product strategy driven by AI large language models.
Emotibot 1+4 product system.
This system is actually to help the domestic large model and build the last mile of commercialization. On the emotibrain model, you can choose general basic models such as Huawei Pangu, ChatGPTMLM, MOSS, MiniMax, llama2, and Baichuan, and use fine-tuning technology to train your own proprietary model.
Because Emotibot's NLP technology can help enterprises better train data knowledge, and then apply it to scenarios such as marketing, customer service, sales training, knowledge management and copywriting through its AIGC products: kkbot, AI coach, knowledge factory and magic writer.
In other words, in the process of helping enterprises apply large models, he can choose better large models to train enterprise-specific large models, because they integrate the enterprise's own knowledge, and its several AIGC applications will also have better results.
Therefore, it can be seen from the propaganda caliber that Emotibot is intelligently built"Model Factory"It can help 90% of enterprises deploy AIGC in one year. Suddenly collapsed before the dawn of commercialization
According to its public information in the past one or two years, there are still many partners of this company.
In March 2023, Emotibot announced the establishment of a strategic partnership with Sugon and Zhipu AI to further promote the application and commercialization of AI technology.
At the same time, Emotibot is also an in-depth partner of HUAWEI CLOUD and participates in the core part of Huawei's Pangu model. The COO of Emotibot described it as an excellent AI industry landing partner of HUAWEI CLOUD.
In the upstream, there are large companies such as Huawei and Zhipu, and in the downstream, there are more than 300 large enterprises, including Minsheng Bank, Guangzhou Automobile Group, and China UnionPay, and the number of ecosystem partners exceeds 50, reaching hundreds of millions of end users.
In the era of large models, Jian Renxian, CEO of Emotibot, emphasized that enterprises do not need models with excessive parameters, "Our general large models and model factories are deployed to the client, combined with customer data and industry know-how, and then adjusted the parameters, and then fine-tuned and trained a 7b-65b large model." ”
From here, it doesn't seem like a big problem with customers and ideas. But in fact, the company's problems may lie in its historical roots, as an AI company that started as NLP, CEO Jian Renxian emphasized that "NLP large model dual engines". According to the analysis of industry insiders, when the tide of ChatGPT hit, Emotibot was still unwilling to give up NLP, which may have caused problems in the company's business.
Therefore, Emotibot mentioned in an internal open letter that it is adjusting its business direction, and during this period, it will give priority to ensuring services to existing customers and strengthening the exploration of new technologies and new products. And for loss-making business lines, we will optimize, and some departments and positions will be suspended from now on and reorganized. Large models and AIGC are also not panacea
The enterprise application model is still in the wait-and-see stage, and the privatization model cost of 200-3 million yuan is often 200-3 million yuan, and not every enterprise can make a move at any time. Emotibot's model is cheaper, and it also needs to wait for the company's cognition and decision-making to be in place.
However, after the last round of D+ round of financing before December, it is clear that Emotibot did not wait for the commercialization of large models and AIGC to hit and suddenly announced a shutdown of production.
Emotibot still retains the opportunity for employees to come back:
Suspension of work and production for 6 months from February 20, 2024, from 10 a.m. on February 20, 2024 to 19 a.m. on August 19, 2024. During this time, we will continue to monitor market dynamics, actively seek opportunities for business development, and ensure that each team member is cared for. The company will keep in touch with you at any time to communicate the information of returning to work or other relevant arrangements in a timely manner.Judging from the current stage, there are currently only large-scale AIGC companies in China, such as Ali and Heygen (overseas digital human company), which have maintained a monthly revenue of millions of US dollars.Wage rates during the period of suspension of work.
According to Article 12 of the Measures of the Shanghai Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau on Printing and Distributing the Measures for the Payment of Wages by Enterprises in Shanghai, the wages of employees shall be paid according to the agreement within a wage payment cycle from the first day of the suspension of work and holidays to the full month of the month.
If the holiday is completed for one month, it will be regarded as more than one wage payment cycle, and the company shall pay the Shanghai minimum wage standard according to the regulations.
More large models and AIGC companies are still difficult to find market scenarios with outstanding commercialization effects, resulting in their own earnings but not profits. Copy.
Search and share the collection and mark the line.