Unique Research · Weekly AI Worldview · March 18, 2024
Editors (CN): Yanjia, Qiuping · Proof: Qiuping
This week’s AI funding
1. ShengShu Tech (生数科技) — multi-¥100M round
Native multimodal (image / 3D / video) foundation models. Led by Qiming Venture Partners; Datat Capital, Hongfu Houde, Zhipu AI, existing BV Baidu Ventures and Zhuoyuan Asia follow. Use of proceeds: multimodal base-model iteration, app innovation, market expansion. Exclusive FA: China Renaissance. Founded Mar 2023; core team from Tsinghua AI Research Institute plus Peking University / Alibaba / Tencent / ByteDance talent. Prior near-¥100M round; past shareholders include Ant Group and Jinqiu Fund. (Source: ShengShu)
2. Aishi Tech (爱诗科技) — ¥100M-class Series A1
AI video foundation models & apps. Led by DC Capital (达晨财智); exclusive FA Light Source Capital. Founded Apr 2023; overseas product PixVerse launched Jan 2024 — claimed largest Chinese AI video-gen product by users overseas, first-tier globally; domestic edition entered closed beta the same day. Proceeds: talent and resource reserve. (Source: Aishi)
3. Yunqi Wuyin (云起无垠) — multi-¥10M angel+
Cybersecurity AI agents. Exclusive investor Langmafeng Capital; FA Yuanming Capital. Founded 2021; multi-¥10M angel in 2022. Products: Wuyin fuzz-testing agent and Wuji AI security agent (genetic mutation, symbolic execution, process-level vuln detection, NLP + context). (Source: Yunqi Wuyin)
4. Kuakua Jingling (夸夸菁领) — ¥10M-class angel
Individual investor. AI “digital employees” for enterprise/gov (recruiting, PhD, government, legal assistants). Clients include BYD, bilibili; some Shenzhen gov units. Founded 2023. (Source: Kuakua Jingling)
5. Baiying Tech (百应科技) — near ¥200M strategic
Baidu and Yangtze River Digital Economy Industry Fund — conversational AI for user ops and public services. (Source: Baiying)
6. Adaptive (Falcon LLM team) — $20M seed
Enterprise LLM customization / alignment. Led by Index Ventures; ICONIQ, Motier, Databricks Ventures, HuggingFund by Factorial + angels. The Information previously cited ~$100M valuation. Full write-up in companion F2AI Focus.
AI headlines
- Enflame × iQIYI — AIGC strategic MoU; “Enflame Yaotu™” for image-to-image training and video style render; applied on costume drama Da Meng Gui Li art-design tooling. (Mar 13)
- Apple testing AI ads — Business Insider: Performance Max / Advantage+-like for App Store; pilots with selected advertisers (budget, audience, country → AI placement across Search Tabs/Results, You May Also Like, Today). Formal launch expected in coming months; Apple no comment.
- CeMeta — first appliance/home marketing LLM (“生生不息”) + three AI marketing products at AWE 2024 (W3 / 3F11); visual model “森罗万象” live demos.
- Robam (老板电器) — upcoming “world’s first cooking AI LLM” with a top domestic lab; prior AWE 2023 digital kitchen AI flagship Creator i7.
- NetEase Youdao — small-sample digital-human platform (Mar 11): one-click avatar clone, lip-sync, short video, video translation, interactive digital humans.
- NIO NOMI GPT Pilot — recruiting for 2024 NOMI refresh; 132 version iterations / 2,000+ features to date; on-car camera for offline-capable, privacy-friendlier GPT interaction + higher-level instruction understanding. (Mar 12)
- JD.com Chunxiao Plan upgrade — 20 support measures incl. free AI toolkit for merchants: store AI assistant (¥0 onboarding), Linglong / Jingdiandian image+copy, Cloud Cut video, digital-human 24h livestream, Jing Xiaozhi smart CS. (Mar 11)
- Meitu WHEE — AI image-edit: upload → brush region → keyword (smart suggest / creative lexicon; negative keywords for control).
- Cognition’s Devin — “first AI software engineer”; full-stack learn/build/deploy; strong SWE-bench; founding team with 10 IOI golds.
- Microsoft Mar 21 event — “Advancing the new era of work with Copilot” (12:00 ET). Expected: Surface Pro 10 / Laptop 6 as early Windows 11 AI devices; on-device Copilot, live captions/translation, game upscaling, Windows Studio Effects, internal “AI Explorer” (searchable activity + contextual tasks; text-based image edit). Likely Windows 11 24H2 (fall).
- 01.AI Yi API platform — Yi-34B-Chat-0205 (chat/Q&A/write/translate); Yi-34B-Chat-200K (200K context); Yi-VL-Plus multimodal (CN charts claimed above GPT-4V).
- Zhipu AI commercialization — >2,000 ecosystem partners; >1,000 scaled LLM apps (Mar 14). CEO Zhang Peng: 2024 expands text→image into image→video / text→video. Products: Qingyan, CodeGeeX, CogVLM, CogView. Early-2024 raise incl. Beijing AI Industry Investment Fund (amount undisclosed).
- Apple acquires DarwinAI — Canadian on-device / manufacturing visual-inspection AI (founded 2017); fits Apple’s on-device AI push ahead of iOS 18. ~$15.5M raised over five years; partners Lockheed Martin, Intel. (Bloomberg)
People
- Elon Musk / xAI — announces open-sourcing Grok this week. Grok-1 powers the Premium+ ($16/mo on X) chatbot; Grok-0 had 33B params; Grok-1 claimed above Llama-2-70B and GPT-3.5 on several benches, still below GPT-4. Hitchhiker’s Guide–inspired “answer almost anything” positioning.
- Sam Altman — returns to OpenAI board after months off board/CEO seat. New directors: Sue Desmond-Hellmann (ex Gates Foundation CEO), Nicole Seligman (ex Sony Entertainment), Fidji Simo (Instacart CEO) — board to seven.
- Jensen Huang — to Stanford’s John Shoven: even if rival AI chips were free, TCO still favors NVIDIA; programmable GPUs vs narrow ASICs; open collaboration posture; goal is unmatched TCO leadership.
22 CN images; attach on ingest.
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