Unique Research · Weekly AI Worldview · April 22, 2024
One week of global AI funding, events, and people moves. CN images — attach on ingest (15).
This week’s headlines
- Funding: Kuaizi Tech ~¥50M B1; Baichuan multi-$100M at >$1.8B valuation; Lenovo-incubated Nuodi ~¥100M Pre-A
- Events: OpenAI Japan + Japanese GPT-4; Adobe Premiere Pro integrates Sora/Pika/Runway + Firefly; Tome lays off ~20%; Kunlun Wanwei Tiangong 3.0 + SkyMusic public beta; Asia–Oceania GenAI software revenue >$18B by 2028; Meta Llama 3; Lenovo Xiaotian × AiPPT.cn; Baidu Qianfan Llama3 full stack next day; DingTalk AI Assistant Market first 200+ assistants; Boston Dynamics all-electric Atlas
- People: Robin Li — open-source models falling behind; small models better efficiency/cost; Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon — hybrid AI is the future
Funding
- Kuaizi Tech (筷子科技) — nearly ¥50M Series B1. AI for enterprise marketing content production/ops efficiency and conversion. Funds expand domestic/overseas markets, train proprietary LLM, optimize product matrix incl. international edition. Products: Kuaizi.ai AIGC content commercial platform + intelligent content managed service. Subscription mix 20%→80%; ~5,000 paying customers across 40 consumer/local-life verticals; at break-even; plans own LLM toward “content commercial Agent.” (Kuaizi Tech)
- Baichuan Intelligence (百川智能) — multi-$100M new round; valuation >$1.8B — among China’s largest 2024 AI raises. Founded by Wang Xiaochuan; within six months shipped four open free-commercial models + two closed models; Aug first through China’s Interim Measures for GenAI Services. C-end product first focus: healthcare — expected 2024 launch. Fastest China LLM startup to unicorn. Five companies now lead China’s foundation-model field including Baichuan. (Baichuan)
- Nuodi Intelligence (诺谛智能) — nearly ¥100M Pre-A; Lenovo Group–incubated “AI + manufacturing” industry model & apps company. Founder Hu Changjian — Lenovo Research AI Lab senior director. Transformer + InstructGPT training; proprietary pretrain industry base model “Fulcrum (支点)” with native-level understanding and new-language transfer. Nearly 100 manufacturing customers; cumulative customer savings multi-$100M RMB. Industry and general models will coexist. (Nuodi)
Events
- OpenAI Japan (Apr 15) — Tokyo office; Japanese-optimized GPT-4; partner with government, enterprise, research on safe AI for Japan-specific needs. Custom models open to local enterprises; strong JP translate/summarize; vs GPT-4 Turbo: cost advantage, ~3× speed. President: Tadao Nagasaki. Tokyo as hub for Asia engagement. (OpenAI)
- Adobe Premiere Pro × OpenAI + Firefly (Apr 15) — integrate third-party T2V (Sora, Pika, Runway/Gen-2) and Adobe Firefly into PR; AI audio to speed editing. Firefly for material replace, precise object removal, freeze frames. SVP Ashley Still: reconstructing video creation workflows. (Adobe)
- Tome layoffs (Apr 15) — 12 people, ~20%. SF GenAI startup; raised $81M at $300M valuation; product depends on others’ AI → fast competitors. 10M+ users but original ICP (founders/freelancers) low willingness to pay. Pro AI presentation service once hit $166k MRR then slowed; early Apr ~$300k MRR / ~$3.5M ARR. (Tome)
- Kunlun Wanwei Tiangong 3.0 + SkyMusic (Apr 17) — public beta of Tiangong 3.0 base + SkyMusic music model; claimed China’s first music SOTA and first China self-developed model lead attempt in AIGC music. Self-developed music-audio gen; style/timbre similarity; Cantonese, Chengdu, Beijing dialects, etc. Tiangong 3.0: 400B params — claimed world’s largest open MoE; lifts in semantics, reasoning, generality, uncertainty knowledge, learning. (Kunlun Wanwei)
- Asia & Oceania GenAI — PR Newswire: GenAI software revenue in region expected >$18B by 2028. China/Japan/Korea most prominent — 300+ foundation models; Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, Tencent, SKT, KT building full-stack. India & Singapore advances; Singapore SEA-LION for Southeast Asian languages. (PR Newswire)
- Meta Llama 3 — open 8B and 70B; open-source SOTA on multiple boards, beating Google Gemma 7B and Mistral 7B Instruct. Pretrained on >15T public tokens — 7× Llama 2 data, 4× code. Roadmap: multilingual, multimodal, longer context. (Meta)
- Lenovo AI agent Xiaotian × AiPPT.cn — AiPPT.cn sole official AIPPT app authorization for Xiaotian; shown at Lenovo Tech World 2024. Founder Zhao Chong: flywheel of people, content, and AI products so white-collar workers “use early, leave early.” (Lenovo Tech World 2024)
- Baidu Qianfan Llama3 next day (Apr 18 Meta → Apr 19) — full Llama3 train/infer stack on Qianfan ModelBuilder for custom models; open for test. Preset ERNIE 3.5/4.0, Speed/Lite/Tiny, Character/Functions; 79 domestic/overseas third-party models — most models among China platforms. Through Apr 2024: >85k customers; 14k fine-tuned models; 190k apps. (Baidu AI Cloud)
- DingTalk AI Assistant Market (Apr 18) — first 200+ AI assistants across enterprise services, industry apps, productivity tools. Four types: role, professional, multi-task, cross-app. Assistants have “agency” — integrate with apps for scene-based smart service. Upgraded action system: person-like ops, workflows, custom capabilities. Tongyi Qianwen, Tongyi Farui, etc. listed. DingTalk AI serves 2.2M+ enterprises; 1.7M+ MAU enterprises. (DingTalk)
- Boston Dynamics all-electric Atlas — new fully electric Atlas; ends hydraulic era. Higher flexibility/agility; turn in tighter spaces. Design for real scenes, not maximum human likeness. Complex tasks incl. heavy lifting. Marks end of an era and rise of more practical, economical robot tech. (Boston Dynamics)
People
- Robin Li (Baidu AI DevCon, Shenzhen, Apr 16) — ERNIE Bot one-year results. ERNIE 4.0 lets Baidu carve scene-fit small models with fine-tune and post-pretrain; downsized models better effect, lower cost. Open-source models will gradually fall behind; LLMs must combine with AI apps for market demand. Three trends: future large AI-native apps mostly MoE-based; small models win on cost and response; agent mechanisms (understand, plan, reflect, evolve) let machines think/act like people. Three tools: AgentBuilder, AppBuilder, ModelBuilder — pack and take, out of the box. Future app building as easy as short video — everyone a developer. (Baidu AI DevCon)
- Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon (Lenovo Tech World, Apr 18) — exciting moment for PCs; Qualcomm wants to co-build next-gen AIPC with Lenovo. GenAI still early; hybrid AI is the future — smarter personalized experiences. Snapdragon X Elite: leading on-device and hybrid AI platform — fastest NPU and top efficiency/battery for PC productivity, creativity, collaboration. (Lenovo Tech World)
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