In early December, when the Dark Side of the Moon share controversy was a hot topic on the channel, Zhang Yutong, the former managing partner of Jinshajiang Venture Capital, became the center of the storm. In Zhu Xiaohu's version of the story, Zhang Yutong violated company rules and fiduciary duties by concealing his huge stake in Dark Side of the Moon, which was spun off from Loop Intelligence, and was fired.

Subsequently, Dark Side of the Moon CEO Yang Zhilin responded to the external controversy late at night, confirming Zhang Yutong’s identity as the co-founder of Dark Side of the Moon and emphasizing that she is “the most suitable person in terms of financing, strategy, and business” "People" who made "important contributions in many financing battles" responded tactfully to Zhu Xiaohu's question about why he did not want to cut off from Zhang Yutong.

Yang Zhilin specifically mentioned, “While we were discussing this issue, the team on the other side of the ocean was releasing new AI products.”

The so-called “team on the other side of the ocean” refers to It's OpenAI.

Currently, this AI big model star company is holding a Christmas season press conference. While Yang Zhilin was trying to resolve disputes over equity and defend Zhang Yutong, Altman sat in the live broadcast room and led OpenAI to release a series of new products such as ChatGPT Pro, the official version of the o1 model, and the public beta version of Sora.

In contrast, Yang Zhilin and The Dark Side of the Moon had to spend a lot of energy around a series of issues unrelated to technology such as spin-offs, equity, and Zhang Yutong. Especially for Zhang Yutong, judging from the comments in the circle of friends, Yang Zhilin quite strongly supports this old friend and continues to cooperate with him.

Part of the reason may be that Yang Zhilin, who is a technical founder, is not good at financing and commercialization.

Alphabet List (ID: wujicaijing) learned that people familiar with the matter revealed that Kimi, who has reached 10 million monthly active users, now spends up to 2 million yuan on advertising in a single day. Regarding this data, Alphabet asked The Dark Side of the Moon for confirmation, but the official did not comment.

In the past year, the investment costs of large AI model companies have increased significantly. Relevant people mentioned that in Bilibili, which has a large concentration of AI vertical users and large model companies, the conversion cost (CPA) of a single user has increased from 20-30 yuan/person at the beginning of the year to 45-50 yuan/person.

Judging from past experience, Yang Zhilin is good at technology and products, but lacking in financing and commercialization. The Dark Side of the Moon is still in the investment stage, so it would be an ideal choice to find someone like Zhang Yutong as a partner who both understands the Dark Side of the Moon and can attract investment.

In contrast, the founders of OpenAI are also technology and product experts, but they also know how to deal with investors—especially Microsoft—and how to promote commercialization. They also know how to hype up the popularity on the Internet. It's quite a bit like living up to the "Yang Zhilin ideal type".

OpenAI, led by Ultraman, has received tens of billions of dollars in critical financing from Microsoft and continues to define AI technology trends with product updates such as ChatGPT o1 and Sora, upgraded versionsThe monthly subscription fee for ChatGPT Pro has soared to US$200, making it the most expensive paid model in history.

However, Yang Zhilin, who has always presented himself in a technical manner, also reaps the benefits of corresponding personas.

For example, many large-scale model entrepreneurial teams in China have fallen into personnel turmoil before, but Dark Side of the Moon has maintained the stability of the team. The co-founders of other companies have been poached one after another, but Dark Side of the Moon has not lost its core technical personnel except for taking the initiative to abolish the overseas department.

Looking at Ultraman, while it was undergoing rapid commercialization, the founding team of OpenAI left in large numbers, shrinking from 11 people in the early days of the business to only 2 people. With the core technical staff leaving, GPT-5 scheduled to be released has yet to be seen.

It has been more than 2 years since the launch of ChatGPT. Yang Zhilin and Ultraman’s different emphasis on large models have pushed Dark Side of the Moon and OpenAI to different development paths, which has also led them to encounter the current challenges. Very different challenges.

Altman and Yang Zhilin are both "academic" entrepreneurs: the former was admitted to the Computer Science Department of Stanford University at the age of 18 and dropped out to start a business in his sophomore year; the latter graduated with the first grade in his grade in 2015. Department of Computer Science, Tsinghua University, and later created Dark Side of the Moon.

Compared with Altman, who dropped out of school to start his own business at the age of 19, Yang Zhilin invested more time in studies and research before starting his own business.

In 2015, 24-year-old Yang Zhilin graduated from the Computer Science Department of Tsinghua University with the first grade in his grade. He was the favorite student of Tsinghua Professor Tang Jie, and then went to the Language Technology Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in the United States. Pursue a Ph.D. He is the most cited researcher in the field of NLP (natural language processing) under the age of 35 in China and the first author of two important papers, transformer-XL and XLNet.

At the beginning of the year, when Kimi was streaming in large numbers on Douyin, the public’s first impression of Yang Zhilin was that of a “genius boy” and “Tsinghua University academic master.” Dark Side of the Moon employees said that he likes to wear simple workwear T-shirts with characteristic black half-rimmed glasses. He is reticent and even a little shy.

A certain Dark Side of the Moon insider told Alphabet that compared to telling stories with investors, Yang Zhilin prefers to dive into technology and mathematical formulas.

Yang Zhilin co-founded Circular Intelligence during his Ph.D. and developed a series of large models with Huawei and other companies. However, the large AI model is not only a competition between technologies and products, but also requires a steady stream of venture capital investment and a commercialization model with profitable prospects. And this seems to be the blind spot of Yang Zhilin's ability.

Yang Zhilin, who comes from a technical background, urgently needs a co-founder who understands both technology and financing to make up for his shortcomings in financing. Zhang Yutong, who once led Jinshajiang’s investment in circular intelligence, is one of the ideal candidates. Yang Zhilin even publicly stated in his circle of friends that Zhang Yutong was already the most suitable choice.

In contrast, Ultraman started as early as 2015Get involved in venture capital.

After selling the startup Loopt he founded, Altman founded the venture capital fund Hydrazine Capital. At the age of 30, Altman had already served as president of the well-known incubator Y Combinator for two years, and co-founded OpenAI with Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

As of March 2019, when Altman announced his resignation, YC’s total market value reached US$150 billion, which has increased several times in just a few years. It can be said that Altman’s resume as an investor is very impressive.

Altman’s most important move in the investment field is undoubtedly the investment from Microsoft in OpenAI.

OpenAI, which was founded as a non-profit, once hoped to fight against the AI ​​hegemony of large companies, but Altman introduced a huge investment from Microsoft. Since its inception, OpenAI’s total financing has reached US$18.7 billion.

In order to obtain financing, OpenAI promised to complete the reorganization within two years, which means that under the leadership of Altman, OpenAI will become a truly for-profit enterprise.

Ultraman’s series of initiatives faced fierce opposition from other founding members, and 9 of the 11-member founding team left. Ultraman, who was once dismissed, continued to promote the commercialization of OpenAI after returning to the company and taking control.

After the advent of ChatGPT, from the paid version launched in February last year starting at US$20 per month to the upgraded version of ChatGPT Pro, the monthly subscription fee has increased to US$200. According to public data, Altman revealed that OpenAI, which only brought in $28 million last year, now has monthly revenue of more than $100 million.

Different business strategies have triggered different challenges for the two people on the road to realizing AGI.

For Ultraman, who is good at "making money and making things happen", the most important thing at the end of 2024 is OpenAI's 12-day product launch on Christmas Eve.

OpenAI, which has experienced an exodus of core technical personnel, faces doubts about its ability to maintain its technological advancement despite completing the latest round of high-profile financing of US$6.6 billion.

For investors, betting on OpenAI, which has a valuation of US$157 billion, is undoubtedly a big gamble. Only if OpenAI is still the best large-scale model company, will it be worth betting on. Faced with the approaching of giants such as Google, Altman needs to answer a question, that is, after a large number of core technology executives leave, can OpenAI still maintain an absolute technological leadership in the industry?

The 12-day product launch conference became a new stage for Ultraman to prove the leadership of OpenAI technology.

Caption: Ultraman announced OpenAI’s technology live broadcast on OpenAI new productsProducts and new features seem less out of reach.

Take Sora, which started the AI ​​video generation craze at the beginning of the year, as an example. After Sora was officially released recently, both in terms of generating effects and claiming to provide various definitions and aspect ratios, it also added a large number of functions related to video editing. , are not amazing.

Large model entrepreneur Lin Feng (pseudonym) told Alphabet that domestic video models with many functions of Sora have already been launched. In terms of completeness as APP tools, Doubao and Conch must be more complete. The generation effects are almost the same as those of luma, pika and Keling.

Unlike Ultraman, who has solved the blood transfusion problem and needs to prove the advancement of his technology to the outside world, for Yang Zhilin, who is busy investing in investment to expand the number of Kimi users, financing is much more important. .

According to AppGrowning data, since March this year, Kimi has spent tens of millions of yuan on advertising in a single month. In the fourth quarter, Kimi advertising reached 220 million yuan in October and 200 million yuan in November.

Relevant people told Alphabet that the daily streaming fee of 2 million has become the standard for Dark Side of the Moon to maintain high daily activity data, and the reason behind doing data is precisely for financing.

With more than one leading model company abandoning third-party pre-training, Dark Side of the Moon wants to sit on the AGI racing table with Byte, Baidu, etc. One of the prerequisites is Make sure you can get more financing.

According to Orange IT data, from January 1 to August 27, there were 317 financings in the domestic AI field, with a total amount of more than 33.3 billion yuan, and an average monthly financing amount of 4.2 billion yuan, less than two months last year. become. Faced with the increasingly high valuations of large model head manufacturers, concerns about high-end takeovers have also begun to linger over investors.

“Investors’ wallets are tight now, and projects either cannot afford to invest, or must ensure a rate of return,” a partner of a U.S. dollar fund told Alphabet, which is still burning money and can’t see a clear path to profit. For investors, large models no longer represent "high risk and high returns". The investment institutions that were desperately trying to seize the investment opportunity of the six tigers in large models a few years ago have also quietly lost their voice.

However, when the trend of large models has passed two years ago, Yang Zhilin and Ultraman are also facing the same problem, that is, creating a killer application based on large models.

“In the next 5 to 10 years, there will definitely be opportunities for large-scale market application.” Yang Zhilin believes that taking ChatGPT, which already has 500 million users, as an example, AI products have a higher upper limit and can be used in A variety of functions are integrated into one product, playing the role of a super AI assistant.

Just as Douyin has become the entrance to various scenarios such as social networking, content creation, live e-commerce, food group buying, and even wine and travel in the mobile Internet era, Ultraman also predicted in a public interview that large models will Create super AI intelligence within thousands of days. The current competition in AI applications is more like competing to become the killer application in the era of large AI models.

During the 12-day OpenAI live broadcast conference, Lin Feng also noticed that Sora released a separate product, which was not a multi-modal model under the GPT system.

“It’s so product-oriented, it’s really not OpenAI.” Lin Feng said that Sora has added a lot of video editing and processing functions, which is not the usual style of OpenAI, but closer to the overseas version launched by Byte. Cut CapCut.

Obviously, both Dark Side of the Moon and OpenAI are waiting for an opportunity to truly break through the circle.

Although Kimi and ChatGPT have 10 million monthly active users and 100 million subscriptions, their user scale is still not ideal compared to foreign Google, X, and domestic Douyin.

In a previous interview, Yang Zhilin mentioned, “Focus on doing the most important things well, and always maintain the smallest number of people in a large model company, with the highest ratio of cards to people. To make a product well, do To the extreme is the most important thing.”

For this reason, in March and April of this year, Dark Side of the Moon took the initiative to reduce its business. Not only did it make it clear that it would not develop large-scale video models, The overseas business line was also subsequently disbanded.

At the same time, super applications need clear commercialization paths and scenarios. But even ChatGPT, which has hundreds of millions of subscriptions, is just exploring the possibility of raising the monthly subscription fee from US$20 to a more expensive US$200 version.

Altman revealed to employees that OpenAI’s revenue this year reached US$1.3 billion, but no profit data was disclosed. Whether it is profitable is still a mystery. In addition, the proportion of revenue from cooperating with Microsoft and calling OpenAI models in the Azure global version is not yet known.

Dark Side of the Moon has never disclosed revenue figures. Following the example of paid tips launched by ChatGPT, it is impossible to estimate its actual income.

In an interview, Yang Zhilin once quoted the words of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman: "Many times you are willing to do something you don't know. In fact, you don't know that there are many things you don't know. , that’s why you have this Do it with such courage. When you do it, you will find that there are many new problems. Maybe this thing is the meaning of innovation."

Betting on super applications is the joint choice of Yang Zhilin and Ultraman. , which is also their joint effort.