Recently, it was reported that Ant Group has established a reinforcement learning laboratory, and Wu Yi, founder of the large model start-up Frontier Technology, has joined as the chief scientist of the laboratory. Wu Yi responded to the incident of joining Ant in the circle of friends: "I was recently invited by Ant to do research on the reinforcement learning direction of Ant's large model. My teaching at the Interdisciplinary Information Institute of Tsinghua University and Frontier Technology are continuing. Ant has a very good large model. Application scenarios, I hope we can create impactful ones together Impactful work.

Previously, Wu Yi refuted the rumors that Biansai Technology was being acquired by Ant Group, saying that Biansai Technology will operate normally now and in the future, and it is false news that the company will be acquired. p>

Some people familiar with the matter also said: Biansai Technology has not been The acquisition is a cooperation agreement signed with Ant Group, and the details will be announced later.

Biansai Technology is a start-up company that focuses on combining large language models and reinforcement learning. Tianyancha APP shows that the company is owned by Tsinghua University. Established with holding investment and obtained angel round Investments from Shunwei Capital, Kingsoft Office, Xiaomi and ZhenFund.

The founder of the company, Wu Yi, was born in 1992. He graduated from the Yao Class of the School of Interdisciplinary Information at Tsinghua University with a bachelor's degree and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Branch school, during which he studied under Pieter Professor Abbeel studies the field of reinforcement learning (Reinforcement learning research). Wu Yi's first paper "Value Iteration Networks" published in the field of deep learning won the NIPS 2016 Best Paper Award. In 2019, Wu Yi graduated from Ph.D. As a researcher at OpenAI, he participated in a number of innovative projects. Among them, the game project "Hide and Seek" he participated in was the video with the highest click-through rate in OpenAI's history. In 2020, Wu Yi resigned from OpenAI. After returning to China, he served as an assistant professor at the Institute of Cross-Information at Tsinghua University, and then founded Frontier Technology in 2023.

Since this year, it is not uncommon for executives from large-scale startups to join large manufacturers. , Jiang Yuchen, CEO of large model start-up Waveform Intelligence, led the team to join OPPO. Speaking of Jiang Yuchen’s appointment, Liu Zuohu said in an interview with the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily and other media that the mobile phone is A. The carrier with the best I application experience hopes to attract high-end AI talents from around the world to join. Huang Wenhao, vice president of Zero-One Everything Algorithm and head of model pre-training, has also joined the ByteDance large model team.

It is worth mentioning that the US large-scale model market is also experiencing a wave of mergers and acquisitions, with giants acquiring star unicorns one after another. For example, Google acquired the US large-scale model star unicorn Character in disguise with a valuation of US$2.5 billion. AI, the two co-founders of the company returned to Google and provided Google with a non-exclusive license to its large model technology. Amazon and Microsoft acquired the unicorns Adept AI and Inflection AI in the same way.

These actions show that major Chinese and American manufacturers are accelerating the improvement of their AI layout by acquiring core talents and technologies from AI startups. They also mean that after the boom of the past two years from the end of 2022 to the present, the large model market Entering the integration period.

Some industry insiders and investors judge that basic large models will enter the elimination round, and most of them are difficult to differentiate and commercialize and will soon disappear.

“On the large AI model (track), only 10 companies will play important roles.” Zhang Yaqin, a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said previously.