GPT-triggered artificial intelligence wave continues to ferment, as one of the domestic high-quality large model companies, the dark side of the moon has been quite sought after by capital, with the recent exposure of a financing plan of more than 1 billion US dollars, the dark side of the moon has been established less than a year has stood out from the peers.
Just over 11 months after its establishment, the dark side of the moon has once again detonated the AI enthusiasm of the domestic investment circle.
On February 19, it was reported that the dark side of the domestic large model company Yuezhi quietly completed a B round of financing of more than 1 billion US dollars, which is the largest single round of financing for Chinese large model startups since the emergence of ChatGPT.
It is reported that in addition to the "old friends" of Sequoia Capital, many domestic Internet companies such as Alibaba, Meituan, and Xiaohongshu have also appeared in this financing.
It is worth mentioning that although the dark side of the moon has not been established for a long time and the company's founding team is quite young, it is still highly expected by all capitals, mainly due to the company's ultra-high talent density and the strategic direction of long text plus to c.
Founded less than 1 year ago, it is valued at $2.5 billion
With more than $1 billion in financing in one go, the dark side of the moon is gradually opening up a gap with other large model companies in China.
It is reported thatThe Dark Side of the Moon was led by Alibaba, with participation from Sequoia China, Meituan, Xiaohongshu and other well-known investment institutions and Internet companies. It is worth mentioning that it is reported that Ali alone invested $800 million in this round of financing alone, and after the completion of this round, the valuation of the dark side of the moon is approaching $2.5 billion.
According to public information, the dark side of the moon was founded in March 2023 and is a domestic startup company in the field of general artificial intelligence (AGI), committed to seeking the optimal solution to convert energy into intelligence, and creating intelligence with users through products. The founder of the company, Yang Zhilin, holds the dark side of the moon 78968% of the shares, the sole largest shareholder and actual controller of the company.
It is worth noting that since its inception, the dark side of the moon does not seem to have worried about money. Tianyancha data shows that on June 12, 2023, the dark side of the moon received an angel round of financing, with Sequoia Capital China and Zhen ** investors investing in Sequoia Capital China and Zhen Ge**, and the valuation of the dark side of the moon after the financing is completed is 300 million US dollars, which is only three months after the company was established.
In October 2023, the dark side of the moon launched the world's first intelligent assistant product kimi that supports the input of 200,000 Chinese characters, and with its significant advantages in Chinese (able to support the context of about 200,000 Chinese characters), Kimi has once again attracted the attention of many capitals.
At the end of December 2023, China Merchants China** also announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Minxing Investment***, signed a preferred share purchase agreement and other related agreements with the dark side of the moon, intending to invest $10 million in the dark side of the moon.
In addition, the dark side of the moon has also completed a financing of more than 200 million US dollars in 2023, with investors including Sequoia China, Zhen**, etc.
It is worth noting that the biggest difference between this financing of more than $1 billion and the previous one is that many major Internet companies have also bet. In fact, recently, the strategic investment of large Internet companies in domestic general model enterprises has become more and more frequent.
Specifically, Alibaba has invested in startups including Zhipu AI, Baichuan Intelligence, and Zero One Everything, but the investment in the dark side of the moon is Alibaba's largest investment in the field of large models so far; Meituan invested in Zhipu AI and acquired Lightyear; Tencent has invested in Zhipu AI, Baichuan Intelligence, and Minimax; Xiaomi Investment has invested in Baichuan Intelligence and Zhipu AI.
In fact, a single round of financing of more than $1 billion is quite rare, as a start-up team established less than a year ago, the dark side of the moon is popular with capital is inseparable from the strong founding team behind it.
The founder is a post-90s student
In June 2023, the information took stock of the top 5 AI startups in China, namely Minimax, Lanzhou Technology, Zhipu AI, Lightyear Beyond (acquired by Meituan) and Yang ZhilinAnd Yang Zhilin is the only participant who made the list with his personal name.
It is reported that Yang Zhilin is a post-90s student from Shantou, Guangdong, during middle school, Yang Zhilin was selected to enter the training class of the Informatics Olympiad, and won the first prize in the Guangdong Division of the National Youth Informatics Olympiad League, and obtained the qualification of Tsinghua University as a guaranteed student.
After graduating from Tsinghua University in 2015 with the highest grade in his grade, Yang went to study at Carnegie Mellon University's Institute of Language Technology (LTI), which is ranked No. 1 in natural language processing in the United States, under the tutelage of Ruslan Salakhutdinov, head of AI research at Apple, and William Cohen, chief scientist at Google.
It is reported that during his Ph.D., Yang Zhilin cooperated with many Turing Award winners to publish more than 20 articles in computer conferences such as ICLR, NEURIPS, ICML, ACL, and EMNLP.
Among them, the results of two studies on Transformer-XL and XLNet are the most critical. It is reported that Transformer-XL has become the first attention language model that comprehensively surpasses RNN; XLNet surpasses Google's BERT model in 20 tasks.
In addition, Yang Zhilin has also worked in Facebook AI Research and Google Brain to engage in natural language processing research, and won the first place in the Dream9 Global Cancer** Competition and the second place in the Alibaba Tianchi Big Data Competition.
It is worth mentioning that in 2016, Yang Zhilin, who is still studying for a Ph.D., participated in the creation of Circular Intelligence, focusing on the use of NLP, voice, multi-modality, large models and other AI technologies to create a "sales technology" solution.
It is worth mentioning that Yang Zhilin attaches great importance to talent densityPreviously, it has expressed the hope that through high talent density and organizational strength, we can build a quickly iterative organizational machine, so that talents can quickly develop better products based on existing and future developed technologies. Because of this, Yang Zhilin has built a luxurious entrepreneurial team.
It is reported that Zhou Xinyu, the head of the algorithm team of the dark side of the moon, and Yang Zhilintao, both students of the Department of Computer Science, graduated and joined Megvii, he cooperated with Zhang Xiangyu, the head of basic scientific research of the Megvii Research Institute and one of the authors of Resnet, to study the mobile model, and wrote shufflenet** as a joint author. The results of this research have influenced various millisecond-level face unlock technologies for mobile phones, including Apple's 3D face unlock.
Another co-founder, Wu Yuxin and Yang Zhilin, both graduated from Tsinghua University and CMU, and their research focuses on detection and recognition problems in computer vision. Previously, Wu Yuxin worked at Meta's fair, during which he created Detectron2, which became one of Meta's most popular AI projects.
In addition, the team of more than 100 people on the dark side of the moon has also brought together talents from the world's top institutions such as CMU, Google, Meta, and Amazon.
The sword is pointed at the super app
In fact, the capital's favor for the dark side of the moon also lies in its strategic direction of long text plus to c.
In October 2023, the dark side of the moon released its first large-scale model, Moonshot, and Kimi Chat, an intelligent assistant product equipped with this model, which attracted attention from all parties as soon as it was released.
It is reported thatKimi Chat supports ultra-long text input of up to 200,000 Chinese characters, which is the longest context input length that can be supported in the current global market in a large model service that can be productized, you must know that Anthropic's Claude-100K model only supports about 80,000 words, and OpenAI's GPT-4-32K only supports about 250,000 words.
Yang Zhilin believes that "when we look at the history of computer systems, an inevitable trend is that they all start from the very small memory computer services, and then to the large memory services. So I think there will definitely be the same trend for large models, from large models with very little memory now to large memory in the future." The long text technique determines the size of the "memory" of the large model.
In addition, Yang Zhilin also chose to focus on C, wanting to create a Super App in the AI era, and the dark side of the moon launched the first C-end product "Kimi Intelligent Assistant", which is his first attempt to create a Super App.
Yang Zhilin has previously said, "Iterative efficiency is a very important keyword for us, which determines the corporate culture, talent structure, and the ultimate idea of doing this." When these latitudes are combined, to c is a natural choice."
It is worth noting that Yang Zhilin once said that the highest priority task of Moonshot AI now is to find the direction of products, technologies and markets on the C-side.
However, compared with TOB, TOC is quite a money-burner, and if it can't really improve its hematopoietic ability and form a virtuous circle, then it may lose in the battle for large models.