The Entrepreneurial Boom in China Sparked by ChatGPT Welcomes New Members
ChatGPT is sparking an entrepreneurial movement in China, attracting a steady stream of new members. Some of them come from major companies such as Alibaba, Kuaishou, Bytedance, Tencent and others.
According to a report by Chinese Entrepreneurs, in March, Jia Yangqing, Alibaba‘s Vice President of Technology, announced his resignation along with his team. They plan to start a business venture that will focus on AI applications including large-scale models.
LatePost‘s report states that Qie Xiaohu, who served as Vice President of Tencent and headed the Information and Service Department of Platform and Content Business Group, has resigned. Rumors suggest that Qie is planning to launch an AI-related business.
Li Yan, a prominent member of Kuaishou’s AI team, departed the company in 2021 and established Yuanshi Technology in 2022. The new venture is dedicated to researching and developing multimodal large models. Additionally, Li Mu, Amazon’s chief scientist, is reportedly considering joining Boson.ai – an artificial intelligence firm founded by machine learning expert Alex Smola who was also Li’s doctoral supervisor at Carnegie Mellon University.
LatePost reports that several new projects are currently in the preparation or financing stages. One of these is a company advised by Shen Xiangyang, chairman of the International Digital Economy Academy (IDEA), and founded by Zhang Jiaxing, who heads IDEA’s Cognitive Computing and Natural Language Research Center. Additionally, Zhang Qianchuan, former product manager at Toutiao under ByteDance, plans to develop a social networking application for the AI era. Finally, Wang Meihong – formerly international technology director at Kuaishou – aims to create a video version of Midjourney, an application that generates videos based on text input.
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Lightyear Technology, which was founded by Wang Huiwen, a co-founder of Meituan, has launched its second round of financing with an estimated pre-investment valuation of around $1 billion. Su Hua, the chairman of Kuaishou, is closely monitoring the progress of large-scale models and has invested in multiple projects.
