How good is the "Tsinghua Department" behind the "Four Little Dragons" of big models?

Baichuan Intelligence as the first batch of domestic established in April 2023AI macromodelThe company. 2 months ago, completed the A round of financing, the total amount of financing amounted to 5 billion yuan RMB. At present, Ali, Tencent, millet and other technology giants and a number of top-tier investment institutions are its shareholders. the pre-investment valuation of the B round has reached 20 billion yuan ~! However, Baichuan Intelligence is the latest entry in the new four dragons of the domestic big model.

Today we will talk about the big model "Four Little Dragons" and its backing of the powerful Tsinghua Department in the field of AI in the end how good is it?

01
Big Model Four Little Dragons

Currently the market is recognized as the four dragons of the big models: Smart Spectrum, Dark Side of the Moon, Baichuan Intelligence, Minimax.

Smart Spectrum AI:Founded in 2019, it was transformed from the technical achievements of Tsinghua University's Department of Computer Science, and is committed to building a new generation of cognitive intelligence general model. The company's core team also comes from Tsinghua, with CEO Peng Zhang having a PhD from Tsinghua's Department of Computer Science, President Shao-Lan Wang having a PhD from Tsinghua's Innovation Leader, and Chief Scientist Jie Tang having a professor from Tsinghua's Department of Computer Science.2024 At the beginning of September, Wisdom Spectrum AI completed its latest round of multibillion-dollar financing, with Zhongguancun Science City Inc. as the lead investor.

Dark Side of the Moon:Founded in March 2023, the company is led by Prof. Yang Shik-Lin, a young scientist at Tsinghua University's School of Intersectional Information and Wisdom Source, and the two co-founders, Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin, both of whom also come from Tsinghua. The company has received nearly 2 billion RMB investment from Sequoia, Today Capital, Tonus Capital, Zhenge Fund and other well-known organizations.

Bacchus Intelligence:Founded in April 2023, it was co-founded by Wang Xiaochuan, the former CEO of Sogou, and Ru Liyun, the COO. 2 months ago, it completed the A round of financing, with a total amount of RMB 5 billion, and the pre-investment valuation of the B round has reached RMB 20 billion. The company is officially among the ranks of technology unicorns, setting a record for the fastest promotion of unicorns by large model startups in China.

Minimax:Founded in December 2021, its core team from Shangtang, founder Yan Junjie in Shangtang from intern to vice president, but also served as vice president of the research institute and the smart city business group CTO, this business had contributed a lot of revenue for Shangtang. Ali led Minimax's massive new round of financing of $600 million, valued at more than $2.5 billion. At the end of 2021, before the end of the Shangtang IPO, Yan Junjie left to found MiniMax. co-founder Zhou Yucong was also in charge of the algorithm team at the Shangtang Technology Research Institute.

Wisdom Spectrum AI stands behind Ali, Tencent, and Meituan; Baichuan Intelligence has Ali, Tencent, and Xiaomi behind it; the dark side of the moon is Ali and Meituan; MiniMax is Tencent. The big factories are all two-handed: one hand investment, one hand self-research, the main one walks by without letting go.

Three of the Four Little Dragons are Tsinghua-based, Smart Spectrum, Baichuan, and Dark Side of the Moon.Only Minimax is a Shangtang department, which shows the jianghu dominance of Tsinghua department in the field of big models~!

02
Tsinghua Department in the big model map

The Tsinghua Science and Technology Park brings together two heavyweight members of the big domestic models:Smart Spectrum AI and Baichuan Intelligence. Smart Spectrum AI is located on the 7th-11th floors of Sohu Network Building in the southeast corner of Tsinghua Science Park. Baichuan Intelligence is located on the 17th floor of Block B of Sail Building in Tsinghua Science Park. These two are across the street from each other~!

The founding team of these two has a strong Tsinghua gene, and today we will look at the Tsinghua Department's share in the field of large domestic models.According to incomplete statistics, from 2019-2023, at least 30 Tsinghua alumni have gone down to start their own businesses to invest in the big model industry, founding more than 15 companies and accumulating more than 15 billion yuan in financing.

It can really be described as a mainstay and a group of stars shining~! The present situation is not possible without the deep precipitation of Tsinghua University in the field of artificial intelligence. Li Feifei's team released the "2024 Artificial Intelligence Index Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report") in the discussion of the generation of global AI models, Tsinghua University became mentioned as one of the academic institutions with the highest number of basic models released among non-Western institutions, with a total of seven basic models released.

(Feifei Li, born in 1976 in Beijing, American nationality, PhD graduate of California Institute of Technology, computer scientist, director of Stanford University's Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute (HAI), member of the AI Safety Committee, the first Sequoia Capital Professor, member of the U.S. Academy of Engineering.)

The rise of Tsinghua University in the field of large-scale AI modeling is not an overnight achievement, but thanks to the perfect combination of its profound academic accumulation, forward-looking strategic planning and abundant financial support.

At the academic level, Tsinghua is regarded as one of the cradles of AI in China.In this vein of development, distinguished professors such as Zhang Cymbal, Yao Zhizhi, and Sun Maosong are the cornerstones of the AI discipline at Tsinghua and in China as a whole.

In 1979, Cymbal Zhang left his long-time research in the field of automation, and together with colleagues such as Zhang Yukai and Lin Yaorui, took the lead in founding the specialization of "Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Control," aiming to fill the research gaps in China.

As one of the first Chinese scholars to visit the United States, Zhang Cymbal traveled to the U.S. for further study, and deeply experienced the gap between the development of artificial intelligence at home and abroad. Upon his return to China, he quickly devoted himself to pioneering research, and at that challenging early stage, even the textbook "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" used was compiled and printed page by page by faculty members with urgent reference to foreign materials. Subsequently, under the leadership of Zhang Cymbal, numerous AI labs were set up one after another in Tsinghua Park to continuously promote the research, development and application of AI technology. Among them, the theory of quotient space proposed by Zhang Cymbal and its learning algorithms based on planning and point set coverage have contributed greatly to the progress of AI.

Another pioneer of large models in the Tsinghua system, theProf. Yao Zhizhi, the only Chinese scholar to win the Turing AwardHe has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and other top institutions in the world, and enjoys an international reputation.

In 2004, at the age of 57, Yao Zhizhi gave up his tenure-track position at Princeton University and returned to China, and in the following year, he founded the Experimental Class of Computer Science at Tsinghua University ("Yao Class"), which is rumored to be "half of the country's talents are gathered at Tsinghua, and half of Tsinghua's talents are in Yao Class". Yao Class" is a popular saying in the campus. With its unique enrollment mechanism, flexible education model and internationalized teaching environment, "Yao Class" has provided a large number of talents for the computer science industry in the past 20 years, and as of June 2024, it has produced 663 undergraduates in 17 classes.

Compared to Prof. Zhang Cymbal and Prof. Yao Zhizhi.As an early undergraduate representative of Tsinghua's Department of Computer Engineering and Science, Maosong Sun has paid particular attention to practical applications and cutting-edge explorations of large models.The system he developed, CSegTag, has been applied in the FP6 project "Super Peer-to-Peer Semantic Search Engine", which is a cooperation between Tsinghua University and EU countries, and has consolidated his leading position in the field of NLP in China.

Since 1988, Mr. Sun has been teaching at Tsinghua for 36 years, and he has been involved in AI education for many years, including Liu Zhiyuan and his student, Zeng Guoyang, who founded Facing Intelligence, a startup that Mr. Sun has helped to energize as an advisor.

In addition, many industry elites, such as Zhu Jun, Tang Jie, Tang Jiayu, Yi Fanchao, Tu Cunchao, etc., also came from Prof. Sun's class.

It is worth mentioning that Prof. Sun's students graduated from Peking University and likewise nurtured a number of outstanding talents in the industry, for example, Yang Shiklin, CEO of Dark Side of the Moon, studied under Tang Jie, and two of the core members of OpenAI are precisely the best of Prof. Zhu Jun's students. This further builds a strong academic and industrial legacy network of Tsinghua Department.

03
Tsinghua Department in Investment Circle

Data from IT Orange shows thatAs of 2022, Tsinghua alumni's network of contacts in VC has expanded to 1,632 entrepreneurs and 633 investors.

Source: IT Orange

This huge network not only covers many famous entrepreneurs, but also includes Cao Yi, founding partner of Source Capital, Li Zhu, founder of InnoAngel, Deng Feng, managing partner of Northern Light Venture Capital, Niu Kuei-Guang of IDG Capital, Pan Jianyue of Wuyuefeng Capital, Yang Xiangyang of Yuanzheng Capital, Hong Jing of Gao Cheng Capital, Chen Hongwu of Guo Ke Jiahe, Shen Zhengning of Bauhinia Capital, and Wu Haiyan of Hualong Capital. A number of outstanding investors have jointly built a strong support system for Tsinghua entrepreneurs from Tsinghua Capital.

Examples show that Tsinghua-backed investment institutions such as Lingtu Venture Capital have successfully laid out Lixin Intelligence and Zhipu AI, while Tsinghua-originated Zhuoyuan Capital has also accurately invested in potential projects such as BioDigital Technology. In March this year, Sequence Intelligence Technology, a rising star enterprise founded by a Tsinghua doctor, received a 10 million angel round of financing from InnoAngel and Shui Mu Tsinghua Alumni Seed Fund only two months after its establishment, which once again proved the influence and strength of Tsinghua alumni circle in the field of venture capital.

Tsinghua University in the field of artificial intelligence gathered a group of scholars, a group of entrepreneurs, a handful of investors, with the accumulation of more than 30 years in the field of artificial intelligence precipitation of wisdom and heritage, integration of the upstream and downstream industry chain, to open up the industry, academia, research and use of the casting, to lead the domestic large model "far ahead"! I have to say, with them in the heart of the special bottom ~!How ugly is that compared to Pretty Country~!