21st Century Business Herald Reporter Bai Yang Beijing Report
On the evening of June 5th, Zhihu (NYSE: ZH; HKEX: 2390) announced that due to Li Dahai's intention to serve full-time as CEO at Beijing Facewall Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., he will resign as the Chief Technology Officer of Zhihu and be transferred from an executive director to a non-executive director.
Zhihu also announced that former Vice President of iQiyi, Sun Bin, will replace Li Dahai as the company's CTO. During his time at iQiyi, Sun Bin was mainly responsible for intelligent digital production, big data, and business intelligence planning. Prior to this, Sun Bin worked at technology companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo from 2006 to 2015, and served as the Executive General Manager of the Perfect World Education Division from 2015 to 2017.
Li Dahai has been working at Zhihu for 9 years. He joined Zhihu in December 2015 and became Zhihu CTO and Executive Director in May 2018 and March 2021, respectively. Although Li Dahai no longer serves as the CTO of Zhihu, he still maintains a close relationship with Zhihu.
Firstly, Li Dahai owns 2878690 Class A common shares of Zhihu, accounting for approximately 0.97% of the total Class A common shares of Zhihu. In addition, he is also a non-executive director of Zhihu and serves as a director in multiple subsidiaries of Zhihu, including Beijing Zhihu Network Technology Co., Ltd.
More importantly, Li Dahai will serve as the full-time CEO of Facewall Intelligence, which is also a company invested by Zhihu.
According to the data, Face Wall Intelligence was established in August 2022, with core team members from the Natural Language Processing and Social Humanities Computing Laboratory (THUNLP) of Tsinghua University. At the end of 2020, the team released the first Chinese language model CPM-1, and subsequently released models such as CPM-2, CPM-3, CPM-Ant, and CPM-Bee.
Zeng Guoyang, co-founder and CTO of Facewall Intelligence, once told 21st Century Business Herald reporters, "Facewall Intelligence is actually the earliest team in China to make large-scale models. The entire team has strong confidence in large-scale models, and everyone believes that large-scale models are ultimately the feasible path for General Artificial Intelligence. Therefore, the ultimate goal of Facewall Intelligence is also General Artificial Intelligence."
Zeng Guoyang was born in 1998 and had already won a gold medal in the National Youth Informatics Competition in his sophomore year of high school, which led to his recommendation to Tsinghua University. In his sophomore year, Zeng Guoyang joined the Tsinghua NLP laboratory to develop large language models and was also one of the main developers of CPM-Ant and CPM-Bee models.
Zeng Guoyang and Zhihu also have a strong connection. Previously, Zeng Guoyang had been an excellent respondent in the field of Zhihu machine learning, and had an academic collaboration with Zhihu in 2018.
In March 2023, Zhihu completed an angel round investment of tens of millions of yuan for Facewall Intelligence, and Li Dahai became a director of Facewall Intelligence. Subsequently, both sides began deep co construction of the big language model.
Zhou Yuan, founder and CEO of Zhihu, once stated that investing in Wall Intelligence and co building models with it is a shortcut chosen by Zhihu when building its foundational model layer capabilities. In April 2023, Zhihu released the "Zhihai Map AI", which is a new model trained on the basis of the wall facing intelligent CPM-Bee model.
In June of the same year, Zhihu announced that Li Dahai would be appointed as the CEO of Facewall Intelligence, responsible for the strategic development and daily operational management of Facewall Intelligence. At that time, Zhihu stated that Li Dahai, who also serves as the director and CEO of Facewall Intelligence, would help closely link the two companies, accelerate the research and development process in the field of large models, and engage in deeper cooperation.
In April this year, Facewall Intelligence completed a new round of financing worth hundreds of millions of yuan, led by Chunhua Venture Capital, Huawei Hubble, and the Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund. Zhihu, as a strategic shareholder, also continued to support the investment.
So, although Li Dahai is no longer the CTO of Zhihu, it doesn't seem to affect the relationship between Facewall Intelligence and Zhihu.
Another noteworthy point is that recently, Face Wall Intelligence has just experienced a wave of plagiarism.
On May 29th, an AI team from Stanford began promoting online that $500 could train a SOTA multimodal model called Llama3-V. The author claimed that Llama3-V has stronger performance than GPT-4V, Gemini Ultra, and Claude Opus.
But soon, the Facewall Intelligence team confirmed that Stanford's model and its MiniCPM-Llama3-V2.5 model exhibited astonishing similarity. Stanford's model can not only identify the Warring States ancient characters in the "Tsinghua Bamboo Slips", but also have the same wrong recognition results. These ancient character data were scanned and manually marked from the Tsinghua Bamboo Slips by the smart team facing the wall for several months, and have never been disclosed, thus confirming the fact of plagiarism.
Regarding this, Li Dahai also posted, "We hope that the good work of the team will be noticed and recognized by more people, but not in this way." He also said, "We deeply regret this matter. On the one hand, we lament that this is also a way of being recognized by international teams, and on the other hand, we call on everyone to build an open, cooperative, and trustworthy community environment."