Chinese Startup 01.AI Is Winning the Open Source AI Race

Meta shook up the race to build more powerful artificial intelligence last July by releasing Llama 2, an AI model similar to the one behind ChatGPT, for anyone to download and use. In November, a little-known startup from Beijing, 01.AI, released its own open source model that outperforms Llama 2 and scores near the top of many leaderboards used to compare the power of AI models. Within a few days of its release 01.AI's model, Yi-34B, rocketed to the top spot on a ranking maintained by startup Hugging Face, which compares the abilities of AI language models across various standard benchmarks for automated intelligence. A few months on, modified versions of 01.AI's model consistently score among the top models available to developers and companies on the Hugging Face list and other leaderboards. On Monday, the startup launched a "multimodal" AI model called Yi-VL-34B that can process images and discuss their contents.