---
title: "Weekly AI Worldview | Musk Opens Grok; Apple Acquires DarwinAI; Baiying Raises Near ¥200M Strategic"
author: "Unique Research"
sourcePublication: "Unique Research (FFCAP English library)"
originalPublishedAt: "2024-03-18T19:00:00+08:00"
canonical: "https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20240318a08dcs00"
source: "https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20240318a08dcs00"
language: "en"
cnSourceUrl: "https://view.inews.qq.com/a/20240318A08DCS00"
---

# Weekly AI Worldview | Musk Opens Grok; Apple Acquires DarwinAI; Baiying Raises Near ¥200M Strategic

_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

1.  **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)
2.  **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.
3.  **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.
4.  **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.
5.  **NetEase Youdao** — small-sample digital-human platform (Mar 11): one-click avatar clone, lip-sync, short video, video translation, interactive digital humans.
6.  **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)
7.  **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)
8.  **Meitu WHEE** — AI image-edit: upload → brush region → keyword (smart suggest / creative lexicon; negative keywords for control).
9.  **Cognition’s Devin** — “first AI software engineer”; full-stack learn/build/deploy; strong SWE-bench; founding team with 10 IOI golds.
10.  **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).
11.  **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).
12.  **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).
13.  **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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