Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI

At the end of the year, many Hangzhou companies, under the aura of the "mysterious power of the East," were intensively placed in the spotlight at home and abroad. For a time, the term "Hangzhou's Four Little Dragons" spread like wildfire in the world.

Hangzhou Four Little Dragons

This game is closely related to Hangzhou. The thunderous "year-end show" of science and technology began with Premier Li Qiang's investigation in Zhejiang from December 18th to 20th. On the evening of December 20, "News Network" recorded a clip of his visit to the Science and Technology Innovation Corridor in the west of Hangzhou. In less than 3 minutes, Feng Ji, the founder of Game Science, and "Black Myth: Wukong" and Rokid founders wished Mingming and their newly released Rokid Glasses AI glasses have been featured.

One is China’s first 3A masterpiece, which made the suona sound ring for the first time at TGA, known as the Oscars of the game. Even though it was a pity that it missed the best game of the year, it also left a legacy of “No need for a cassock to prove success.” " has a reputation in the world; one is the Chinese representative of XR glasses, and has been repeatedly compared with Meta by overseas media such as Time Magazine and Geeky Gadgets.

This monkey scene is just a warm-up.

Three days later in the afternoon, Yushu Technology released a video of the advanced version of B2 robot dog B2-W showing off its skills. In the video, it turns from four legs to four wheels and easily demonstrates Thomas's full spin, side flip, 360° jump turn and other silky combos, and can also leap down from a height of 2.8 meters. The video quickly received reposts and comments from Musk.

A few hours later, the global AI community was also in a state of panic. DeepSeek, a large model startup from China, launched and simultaneously open-sourced the DeepSeek-V3 model, and announced 53 pages of training and technical details. The large model they trained at less than one-tenth of the cost of their peers leads other large models in the world including GPT-4o in many indicators.

Just like B2-W, a large number of foreign netizens who were shocked asked: "How did the Chinese do it?" In China, some netizens keenly discovered that both companies are based in Hangzhou. of. As a result, at the end of the Year of the Dragon, the "Hangzhou Four Little Dragons" and "Hangzhou Six Little Dragons" suddenly came into being.

Among them, Yushu Technology, Deep Search and Game Science are recognized by all lists. In addition to Rokid, others on the list include Qiannao Technology, which was surveyed by Prime Minister Li Qiang last year and is a representative company of domestic brain-computer interfaces. It also makes robot dogs and humanoid robots, Yunshen Technology, which has a strong background in Zhejiang University, and the world's largest trustworthy company. Spatial intelligence enterprise group core technology with interactive three-dimensional data capabilities, etc.

Heroes don’t ask where they come from

Strictly speaking, this is not the first time that Yushu Technology's robot dog has come out to "blow up the streets". This company, founded in 2016, has captured most of the global quadruped robot market, accounting for more than 60% of shipments. Its customers include Amazon, Google, Nvidia, Meta, etc.

The founder Wang Xingxing is from Yuyao and was born in 1990. He has shown his love for machinery and strong hands-on ability since he was a child. When he was 10 years old, he saw the robot made by the MIT laboratory. Marc Raibert, who led this project, later became the founder of Boston Dynamics, bringing robot dogs into the public eye.

When Wang Xingxing was in college, he once spent 200 yuan to manually complete a simple bipedal robot.

However, Wang Xingxing did not follow the fancy hydraulic control scheme made by his predecessors, and focused on motor drive from the beginning. When I was a graduate student, I spent less than 10,000 yuan to make XDog, won the second prize in the entrepreneurship competition, and got my first pot of gold of 80,000 yuan. Unfortunately, in 2015, no investors were optimistic about this field, so Wang Xingxing joined DJI out of desperation.

Fortunately, he uploaded XDog’s video to the Internet. Later, it was transferred to an external network and sparked heated discussions, which led to a series of changes. Ten years later, Yushu was described by the media as a "terrestrial DJI".

Having been dealing with various mechanical components since he was a child, Wang Xingxing has a clear understanding of the design and cost of each component. Therefore, Yushu's robot dog has excellent performance and the price is significantly lower than that of its peers.

With both the talent of an engineer and the shrewd mind of a businessman, Wang Xingxing is not a scholar in the traditional sense. He studied at Zhejiang University of Science and Technology as an undergraduate, but because of his partiality in English, he missed the opportunity to enter Zhejiang University for graduate school.

But he has absolute confidence in the field of motor-driven robot dogs. When XDog was born, PhDs from MIT asked him for his graduation thesis. In 2019, MIT open sourced the Cheetah quadruped machine. The dog's software and hardware solution, in the important motor part, is exactly the same as the XDog three years ago.

Speaking of confidence, Feng Ji, who wrote his acceptance speech for TGA Game of the Year two years ago, did not hesitate to give in. He said that being confident when you win is just a review of the results. He and Game Science have been "doing specific things, doing difficult things, doing things that you believe in... When doing these, of course you should be confident."

Twenty years ago, Feng Ji, who was studying biomedical engineering in the College of Life Sciences of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, had the opportunity to continue his studies, but missed his studies when he entered "World of Warcraft". He wrote a 6,000-word essay "Who Murdered Our Game?" 》, entered the game industry with full enthusiasm to change the bad status quo of domestic online games.

Ten years ago, he founded Game Science, determined to use solid technology to solve specific problems and make a high-quality game with a realistic attitude. In 2018, he and his team finally made up their mind to "re-journey to the West" andTo make up for the regret left behind in "God of War" 10 years ago, "Black Myth: Wukong" officially embarks on the path of learning.

Zhejiang University people who "connect" GPUs

For 2018 In 2017, Chinese stock investors were filled with painful memories. The Shanghai Composite Index plummeted 25%, and individual stocks were littered with corpses. However, in the ascendant quantitative world, a new team called "Magic Square" has emerged, which has achieved positive returns throughout the year.

The word "magic square" comes from traditional Chinese arithmetic, and the common "nine-square grid" is a type of magic square. If you just look at Magic Square Quantitative’s team composition, it’s hard to imagine that they are a financial company.

Company CEO Xu Jin graduated from the mixed class of Zhu Kezhen College of Zhejiang University. He holds a PhD in signal and information processing from the School of Information of Zhejiang University. His research interests include autonomous robot navigation and stereo vision. The actual controller of the company, Liang Wenfeng, is born in the 1980s. He graduated from Zhejiang University in software engineering, majoring in software engineering and artificial intelligence. In 2008, he began to study quantitative trading.

In 2016, Magic Square integrated AI into its trading system, and two years later “identified AI as the company’s main development direction.” In 2019, Huanfang’s management scale exceeded 10 billion, becoming one of the “four giants” of domestic quantitative private equity. In the same year, they began to study how to build large-scale GPU clusters.

From that year on, they were not short of money and would buy a large number of GPUs every year. By 2021, Magic Square’s investment in supercomputing cluster systems will increase to 1 billion yuan, and it will be equipped with more than 10,000 NVIDIA A100 graphics cards. Rumors began to circulate: "The institution with the largest number of high-performance GPUs in China is not an artificial intelligence company, but Magic Square."

In July 2023, Liang Wenfeng founded DeepSeek to focus on the research of large AI models. and development, the company is located in Hangzhou.

The story of Qunhe Technology, which was also started by alumni of Zhejiang University, began with the "lying meeting" held by the two founders, Chen Hang and Huang Xiaohuang, at the school. At that time, the two "proud students" studying at Zhu Kezhen College of Zhejiang University talked most about computer computing power and Moore's Law. After graduation, the two went to the United States to continue studying computer graphics.

From left: Zhu Hao, Huang Xiaohuang and Chen Hang

When he went to the United States, Huang Xiaohuang received a full scholarship from NVIDIA. His doctoral research direction was GPU high-performance computing. After graduation, he joined the program as a matter of course. NVIDIA is engaged in the construction of programming framework for parallel computing of GPU chips and the development of CUDA. At that time, he probably didn’t realize that he was participating in writing a magnificent technological epic.

After returning to China, two roommates founded Qunhe Technology. The name comes from the GPU architecture Many core processor they built. Their initial idea was to put GPUs in the cloud to support rendering and other applications that require high-performance computing.With it, home design has become the best landing scenario. For a long time, its SaaS product "Kujiale" was more famous than Qunhe.

Thanks to its long-term accumulation in the field of home decoration in the early stage and in the field of Industry 4.0 in the mid-term, Group Core has accumulated a large amount of data in the physical world. As AI gradually moves from the digital world to the physical world, it is sitting on a "gold mine" - the data they synthesize is not only of high quality, but also follows the laws of physics.

On November 20 last year, they disclosed their two major technology engines for the first time: the group core Qizhen (rendering) engine and the group core matrix (CAD) engine. One corresponds to the Wanka cluster supported by super computing power, and the other corresponds to the "physical world simulator" composed of massive data.

The latter has two more words than OpenAI’s definition of Sora’s “world simulator”, emphasizing “reality” more.

The trend started in 2018

In sorting out the "Hangzhou Four Little Dragons" "When looking at our development history, the self-media "Digital Intelligence Frontline" keenly discovered that 2018 is a key node. That year, Qunhe Technology jointly launched the InteriorNet data set with Imperial College London, the University of Southern California, Zhejiang University and other universities to provide a data basis for indoor environment understanding, 3D reconstruction, robot interaction and other research.

At the beginning of that year, Yushu Technology received new financing. In the second half of the year, pre-sale products began to be shipped, and the company's revenue finally started to roll. Wang Xingxing survived the darkest moment.

At almost the same time, the "Black Myth: Wukong" project was launched. Half a year later, the elite team of Game Science moved to Hangzhou. Feng Ji said that the pace here is not as fast as Shenzhen, and the housing prices are not too high. Everyone can bear it. Keep your temper.

In the middle of that year, Rokid held the annual Rokid Jungle. Zhu Mingming, who is used to growing a beard, likes to refer to himself and his team as monkeys. He graduated with a master's degree from the Network Multimedia Laboratory of Zhejiang University and was trying to combine digital technology with reality.

In 2007, he founded "Mammoth Technology" to make mobile operating systems. Three years later, it was acquired by Alibaba. He entered Alibaba to take charge of Alibaba's most mysterious department-M Studio, exploring the concept of human-computer interaction. More possibilities. The person who led this acquisition was Cai Chongxin, who is now at the helm of Alibaba.

In 2018, the protagonist of Rokid Jungle is still the smart speaker. Rokid Glass AR glasses are just one more thing. A year later, the leading and supporting roles changed, and the smart speaker business ultimately failed to stop the giants from pursuing a crazy price war. Instead, AR glasses became the life-saving straw that turned the tide.

Zhu Mingming also returned to the "original point": in April 2012, he attended the Google Glass launch conference on the spot. A few months later, I kept asking questions on WeChat Moments and wanted to find funds myself.A friend is building something similar to Google Glass. Can you recommend relevant talents?

At the end of 2018, Qiannao Technology officially settled in the artificial intelligence town of Hangzhou. They gained a special employee, Ni Mincheng, who has a hand disability. A year ago, he wore a prosthetic leg and used his mind to control it to write calligraphy, completing the debut of Qiannao Technology in China.

Before his arrival, Qiannao Technology’s prosthetic data was mainly collected by engineers wearing them themselves. For a long time, Han Bicheng, the founder of the Harvard Brain Science Center, had to do experiments on himself and apply medical conductive paste on his scalp. At most, he washed his hair more than 30 times a day, and more than 800 times in a year. Second-rate.

Because her son was always washing his hair when making overseas phone calls, Han Bicheng's mother once wondered whether her son was working outside and specifically washing people's hair.

After returning to China, this brain-computer interface company, which was established a year earlier than Musk's Neuralink, has entered the fast lane. More and more people with disabilities and love life are wearing their prosthetics. Play the piano and hold up the torch.

A preview of the future

In what is called "artificial In 2018, the first year of intelligence, the gathering of the Four Little Dragons in Hangzhou can only be regarded as the end of the Green Ping. A year ago, a Google researcher published a paper "Attention Is All You Need", introducing a new model architecture Transformer.

Different from previous neural network models, it uses a brand-new "self-attention mechanism" to process language, which allows the machine to better associate context and understand human language more accurately.

In 2018, Google launched the Bert model based on Transformer, allowing the machine to know whether the "apple" mentioned in a paragraph refers to the fruit being eaten or the Apple company. OpenAI, another three-year-old artificial intelligence startup, has launched a series of models called GPT to allow machines to understand and speak fluently.

But these are all easy and freehand things to look back on. That year, even though its AI computing power business grew significantly, Nvidia was abandoned by capital. By the end of the year, its stock price was only $3, which was almost one-fiftieth of last year's highest price.

However, they still insisted on giving a series of previews about the future. For example, at CES at the beginning of the year, Huang Renxun demonstrated the results of AI in autonomous driving. Although in March of that year, Uber caused huge controversy when it killed a pedestrian during a driverless test.

At the end of the year, NVIDIA also built a high-precision, ultra-realistic face AI generation system that can generate extremely detailed face images as required, and cooperated with MIT to try to use video to generate videos.

These technologies, which seemed like magic at the time, eventually affected all companies related to AI, including the Four Little Dragons of Hangzhou., computing, and data-related technology companies’ future development trajectories.

In 2018, the wind of AI also spread all over China. Following 2017, artificial intelligence was once again included in the government work report; under the leadership of Li Qiang, then Secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee, the first World Artificial Intelligence Conference was held. Last year, at the Davos Forum, Li Qiang specially extended an invitation to the seventh session of the conference.

Xinhua News Agency data map

On October 10 of that year, Huawei released two AI chips. More than a month later, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security issued an export control framework for key technologies and related products, which will implement export controls on cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, chips, robots, quantum computing, brain-computer interfaces, and biotechnology. .

A technological showdown between China and the United States is slowly beginning.

Why Hangzhou?

In 2018, Hangzhou also opened the door to the future. At that time, Hangzhou officially proposed and mobilized the construction of "China's No. 1 Digital Economy City", paving the way for today's high-level reshaping of the country's No. 1 digital economy city and the two-way rush of digital economy and artificial intelligence.

On February 14, West Lake University officially received approval, and Shi Yigong began his search for "piloting the establishment of a new private research university." They recruit top scientific researchers from all over the world, not based on their number of papers, citation rates and other data, but whether they have unique ideas in the fields they are deeply involved in.

A year later, they welcomed Lan Zhenzhong, a young man wearing glasses and looking like a scholar, who was engaged in artificial intelligence research. He is the first author of the well-known paper "ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-Supervised Learning of Language Representations".

Lan Zhenzhong spent a summer vacation designing a solution that can effectively reduce the training parameters of the Bert model and ensure the training effect - much like what DeepSeek did many years later.

If the list of Hangzhou Tech Dragons continues to expand, his West Lake Xinchen will definitely be among them.

Similarly, when talking about DeepSeek, many insiders will naturally mention another open source model from Hangzhou, Owen, a subsidiary of Alibaba Cloud. Speaking of robot dogs, in addition to Yushu Technology, there is also a company with a very poetic name called "Cloud Deep". The founder, Zhu Qiuguo, is from Zhejiang University. Their wheeled robot "Lynx" was released earlier than Yushu's B2-W, which also caused a sensation.

The new AR/AI glasses track is also crowded with elite entrepreneurs from Zhejiang University. Optoelectronics itself is a traditional advantageous major of Zhejiang University. In addition to Rokid, the Hangzhou faces on this list include Li Weike, who was invested by ByteDance and entered the swimming pool with technology.Light particle technology that subdivides the track, Looktech that crosses over from the brain-computer interface, and so on.

They are everywhere in various districts of Hangzhou such as Yuhang, Binjiang, and West Lake. Under the new wave of technology launched by AI, the city's entrepreneurial scene is far more lively than having one more "Hangzhou Four Little Dragons".

As for why they appeared in Hangzhou, after Game Science settled in the art town in Xihu District, a specialist helped these young people who were struggling day and night to find a single apartment, coordinated the canteen to open a small stove for them, and tried their best to do their best. The service is good but not intrusive, so much so that after Black Monkey became famous overnight, when interviewed by the media, he could only say apologetically that "we don't usually deal with him that much."

Learning that Qiannao Technology was returning to China, the leaders of Yuhang District rushed to Boston, met Han Bicheng in the basement of a pile of debris, and solemnly extended an invitation.

These experiences gained from serving technology companies such as Alibaba, Ant Group, Hikvision, Huawei Hangzhou Research Institute, etc. have become part of Hangzhou’s DNA for creating a high-quality business environment. Coupled with the deep-rooted business genes and active capital, it constitutes a huge attraction for high-end talents.

Hangzhou panoramic photo by Han Dan

Faced with competition from foreign technology giants, Liang Wenfeng said that Chinese companies should be confident, learn to lead technological innovation, and learn to organize and cultivate their own high-density Talent. Wang Xingxing said that a high degree of education does not mean everything, "No one is particularly talented, everyone is almost the same."

Feng Ji hopes that everyone can continue to have confidence and ambition, remain brave, honest and kind, and work hard. Do every little thing well, accept the results calmly, and stay on the path of learning until the last moment of your life.

These narratives about self-confidence and bravery confront the difficulties of reality. At the end of the Jiachen Dragon Year, the "Hangzhou Four Little Dragons" made many people once again hear the sound of new power breaking through.