Sinovation Ventures Chairman Kai-Fu Lee Starts New AI Company

On March 19, Kai-Fu Lee, Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital firm, officially launched Project AI 2.0, a new company aimed at succeeding in the AI 2.0 era.

On his WeChat account, Lee stated that Project AI 2.0 has secured the necessary funds and computing power, and has assembled a team of top talent to lead the company. The company is seeking experts in large models, multimodality, natural language processing, AI algorithm engineering and research, and distributed computing to join the team.

Lee also shared Sinovation Ventures’ channels for talent recommendation and cooperation, and included his 1983 application letter to Carnegie Mellon University as a way to demonstrate his unwavering dedication to the field of AI.

Project AI 2.0 is the seventh company cultivated by Sinovation Ventures’ AI Institute. The company has a global focus on developing platforms and applications for the AI 2.0 era. Several senior technical and management experts have already expressed their interests in joining the company. Sinovation Ventures is currently in discussions with top investors regarding the first round of fundraising for Project AI 2.0 and plans to make an official announcement in due course.

Sinovation Ventures holds high expectations for Project AI 2.0 and aims to not only develop a Chinese version of ChatGPT, but also to explore the global market and become a world-class company that can demonstrate Sinovation Ventures’ R&D and engineering capabilities.

“The development of the AI 2.0 era is still in its infancy. At this time, we decided to use our technological and incubatory capabilities to call on top technical talent who share a strong belief in the potential of AI to join together on a global scale,” Sinovation Ventures explained the motivation for incubating the new company.

Sinovation Ventures has expressed its openness to collaborating with exceptional startups in the AI 2.0 model, infrastructure, and applications space. The new platform introduced by Project AI 2.0 is expected to generate more innovative investment opportunities in the future.

According to Jiemian News, in the initial stages of Project AI 2.0, Lee plans to focus on recruiting a world-class management team. After the CEO of Project AI 2.0 is appointed, Lee will strike a balance between overseeing Project AI 2.0 and his responsibilities at Sinovation Ventures.

There is indeed a precedent for this executive plan. When Sinovation Ventures invested in AInnovation, an AI firm that later went public in Hong Kong, Lee devoted a significant amount of time and effort to the startup. Once the business matured, CEO Xu Hui was brought on board.

SEE ALSO: Sinovation Ventures Chairman Kai-Fu Lee Comments on ChatGPT

In his latest speech, Lee emphasized that the AI 2.0 era presents a tremendous opportunity for upgrading office productivity tools. He highlighted that AI 2.0 is driving a revolution in technology, platforms, and applications, similar to how Windows popularized PCs and Android gave rise to the mobile internet ecosystem. He predicted that the AI 2.0 era will create opportunities ten times larger than those of the mobile internet, rewrite existing software and user interfaces, and generate a new wave of AI-first applications and business models.