The lab will combine the research and development capabilities of the two teams to explore technology and services related to AI models, with the aim to create “strong and comprehensive large model solutions” for business clients, according to a statement from Alibaba Cloud.
Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Founded in May 2023, 01.AI achieved unicorn status just six months later, after a funding round that included Alibaba Cloud. The start-up’s open-source foundational large language model (LLM) Yi-34B was once ranked as the best pre-trained model by online AI community Hugging Face. It has since fallen behind.
01.AI’s best model – Yi-1.5-9B-Chat-16K – came in 10th among Chinese competitors, according to the latest ranking by benchmarking platform SuperClue. Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct took the lead, trailing only models from foreign rivals OpenAI and Anthropic.
