Tencent Jogging reaches "Light Years Away"

Author: Jin Gu

Source: Zhoutian Finance (techfinsight)

Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI tool

Nvidia's market capitalization broke trillions of dollars, and Apple's release of its head-mounted display product Vision Pro detonated the entire technology circle. These may be the two most important technology trends in mid-2023. Like the 1990s, has a new round of technological revolution like the invention of commercial mobile phones and the World Wide Web come?

One wave is a big change in the form of interaction, and the other wave is a big explosion in content generation. When the two waves of technology hit at the same time, a footnote under this grand question is, how quickly can a start-up company become a unicorn?

In the last round of Internet entrepreneurial boom, it took only 2 years for the small yellow car ofo. Now, the answer given by Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen may be - 4 months.

On June 5, according to Qubit, Wang Huiwen’s AI start-up Light Years Beyond has recently completed a new round of financing of US$230 million, with a pre-investment valuation of US$1 billion. According to reports, Light Years Beyond’s current round of financing was led by Source Code Capital with an investment of US$80 million; Tencent contributed US$50 million; Wuyuan Capital and Su Hua, one of the founders of Kuaishou, contributed US$40 million.

However, a few hours after the report was published, Wang Huiwen told a reporter from CBN Weekly that "the amount and valuation are not true", but he did not seem to deny the fact that he was invested by Tencent.

Market news is confusing, but Tencent, the rumored investor, has once again attracted attention. In the past week, Tencent has successively invested in two AI start-ups, MiniMax and Shenyan Technology. According to Reuters, MiniMax received more than 250 million US dollars in investment, with a latest valuation of 1.2 billion US dollars, and related entities of Tencent participated in the investment. Shenyan Technology has undergone industrial and commercial changes, and the shareholder has added an investment company under Tencent, and Ma Huateng's ultimate beneficiary share is 4.04%.

After Ma Huateng stated that artificial intelligence is an opportunity like the "industrial revolution", Tencent's investment department made efforts.

01 Light Years Away

At present, the two AI startups with the highest valuation in China are Light Years Beyond and MiniMax.

Light years away has not disclosed any product progress, but with Wang Huiwen's appeal, it has attracted many big shots.

In February this year, Wang Huiwen issued a "hero post" to recruit people. After that, Liu Jiang, vice president of Beijing Zhiyuan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, and Ma Zhankai, the "father of Sogou input method", announced to join Light Years Beyond. Meituan CEO Wang Xing also announced in Moments that he will participate in the A-round investment of Light Years Beyond and serve as a director.

On March 27, Light Years Beyond acquired Beijing First-Rate Technology through a share swap, which was valued at 500 million yuan. On April 6th, based on the existing team of First-Class Technology, Light Years Beyond officially opened. First-class Technology was established in January 2017 to develop a general deep learning framework. Founder and CEO Yuan Jinhui graduated from the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University in 2008 with a Ph.D. Research and development of the learning platform.

Wang Huiwen said in an exclusive interview with Caixin, “The technical tools provided by first-class technology can be used to build large-scale models. In their market, competitors are open source solutions from large companies.”

Through the acquisition, Yuan Jinhui became one of the three co-founders who were light years away, and belonged to an infrastructure background. In addition to Wang Huiwen, there is another founder with an algorithm background. Wang Huiwen revealed at the time that there are more than 40 people in first-class technology, and the team will not be too large if it is light years away. "A hundred people are enough."

Why did Wang Huiwen come to do this? ZhenFund is one of the first investment institutions to invest beyond light years. Dai Yusen, the managing partner of ZhenFund, later told Wanwan that the process of commercializing large-scale technology is difficult for scientists and requires a person with a business mindset. , It also requires entrepreneurs to have the experience of "raising hundreds of millions of dollars and spending them effectively".

Another co-founder of Kuaishou, Su Hua, who was rumored to have "invested 40 million US dollars" to light-years away, established a new company called "Chuangzhi Exploration" some time ago. According to Tianyancha, on April 24, Beijing Chuangzhi Exploration Technology Co., Ltd. was established with a registered capital of 1 million yuan. The legal representative, executive director, and manager are Su Hua, the founder of Kuaishou, and his wholly-owned shares. Kuaishou co-founded Yang Yuanxi is the supervisor.

Source: Tianyancha

In February this year, there were media reports that Su Hua now has a new pursuit and is likely to enter the chip industry. Then, Kuaishou said it was seriously untrue. Prior to this, Su Hua reduced his holdings of Kuaishou shares by a large amount on January 18, with a total amount of about 3.778 billion Hong Kong dollars. Kuaishou said at the time that the proceeds from Suhua’s sale will be used in charitable donations, cutting-edge technology exploration, and infrastructure investment.

In addition to the establishment, Chuangzhi Exploration Company has not released any specific information. However, combined with Su Hua's capital preparation and company name, it is easy to guess that it may be related to AI.

For a while, many technology tycoons in their 40s were retiring to the countryside, but the generative AI launched this year has made the retired tycoons find a second spring. Wang Huainan said in a podcast business interview that the "35-year-old crisis" seems to have suddenly disappeared again.

Kuaishou and Meituan are among the rumored new investors light years away, and they are all closely related to Tencent. Kuaishou has not yet revealed the progress of generative AI products. In the earnings conference call held on March 30, Cheng Yixiao, CEO of Kuaishou, said that Kuaishou has accumulated many years of technology and application accumulation in generative AI. value potential, we will rationally allocate manpower and resources, and invest in long-term innovation breakthroughs in related technologies and organic integration with businesses.”

On May 25th, Meituan’s earnings conference call, Meituan’s founder Wang Xing said, “I believe that AI will change everything and bring greater opportunities than the iPhone and the Internet.” However, regarding Meituan’s AI progress, He said that there is nothing more to disclose at present, and Meituan is in the stage of catching up. This may also be one of the reasons why Wang Xing invests light years away. He assigns the task of exploring new technologies to external companies with close relationships, so as to avoid institutional inertia from curbing innovation.

02 Do not fight for the day and night?

Compared with big companies such as Baidu and Ali that have launched generative AI products in a hurry, when Li Yanhong and Zhou Hongyi are both in a hurry, Tencent seems relatively calm to the outside world. But the heart may be concerned. A person close to Tencent told Zhoutian Finance that in late March, after seeing the effect of Microsoft Copilot, Tencent executives were very shocked. During the meeting, there was a lot of pressure. exclamation.

In the technology circle, for a period of time, some entrepreneurs retreated to the second line, some ran to engage in agriculture, and some were busy hiding profits in financial statements. Until the beginning of 2023, it has been too long since there has been a large-scale igniting of the technology circle. Excited. But now, another wave is coming, which may be an opportunity: to reactivate the reserves of engineers and entrepreneurial determination of China's major technology companies.

A group of bigwigs in the industry hastily exited the stage, showing their own technical declarations, full of pride and turbulent heat waves. However, an investor who invested in MiniMax expressed some cold thinking on a small scale not long ago. He said: " Baidu has indeed cast a wide net in the market, and is anxious to find targets for investment and acquisitions.” “Financing is the easiest thing to do. Many people are still discussing how many A100 cards there are in China, but there are few voices discussing actual engineering issues. How to do it under the parameters of 100 billion, in fact, no team in China has the answer.”

In the midst of the hustle and bustle, everyone turned their attention to the jogging Tencent. Ma Huateng was not unaware of such industry expectations. At the shareholders meeting, Ma Huateng not only stated that artificial intelligence is an opportunity like the "industrial revolution", but also said that "for the industrial revolution Taking the light bulb out a month earlier is less important over the long-term horizon.”

Like other big companies, Tencent has a layout in the field of AI. Since 2016, Tencent began to invest in basic AI research at the company level. Tencent AI Lab was subsequently established. In April 2022, Tencent disclosed for the first time the research and development progress of the Hunyuan AI large model, including but not limited to: computer vision, natural language processing, multi-modal content understanding, copy generation, Wensheng video and other directions. In December, Hunyuan launched China's first low-cost, practical NLP trillion model. At the end of February 2023, according to 36 Krypton Bonus, Tencent has established a "Hunyuan Assistant" project team for ChatGPT-like conversational products, led by Zhang Zhengyou, Tencent's first 17-level researcher/outstanding scientist.

Source: 36 Krypton Workplace Bonus

Also at the performance meeting on May 17, Tencent executives responded that the Hunyuan model was "progressing very well." However, it has not rushed to release.

Photo 03 "Industrial Revolution"

Judging from the current situation, there are roughly three commercialization paths for generative AI: the most direct is to sell subscriptions, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney; and then sell the computing power of large models. The price of ChatGPT’s API interface is $0.002 / 1K tokens, about It is equivalent to 2.7 US dollars for 1 million words; and it is to help other companies train large models.

According to qubit predictions, by 2030, the Chinese market for generative AI will exceed one trillion yuan. According to market research firm Brainy Insights, the global market for AIGC will grow to US$188.62 billion by 2032.

This kind of market forecast is not necessarily accurate, but it is just a footnote to this round of upsurge, reflecting the current popularity of generative AI. So much so that Wang Huiwen said in an interview that compared with pure financial support, the current AI industry is the top talent, and the second is to organize the top talent in the right way.

Going back to the "industrial revolution" metaphor that bigwigs from all walks of life love to use. In 1769, the Englishman Watt applied for a patent for his improved steam engine. Sixteen years later, power looms were used to spin yarn, and large factories and urbanization revolutionized modern society.

Watt was not the first person to invent the steam engine, but an energy-saving improver. The key leap of the steam engine to the industrial revolution originated from the business model proposed by Watt and his business partner Bolton: at that time, the Newcomen steam engine had already Adopted by many mines, it is not easy for the mine owner to make up his mind to switch to a watt steam engine. Bolton boldly proposed that for new users of the Watt steam engine, only one-third of the energy value saved by the Watt steam engine will be charged as a patent fee. Once this business model is launched, a large number of mining companies are willing to replace it with the Watt steam engine. The absolute leadership of technology is not the only winning variable. Entrepreneurship is also an important parameter to activate a technology.

But no one can really see the future, and those who are in the midst of great change cannot figure out what the change means. It was not until the 1830s that economists began to use the term "industrial revolution" to describe this technological change.

Will this round of AI boom be another industrial revolution? To what extent will AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) change the organization of society? I hope Wang Huiwen can give an answer.

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