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Artificial intelligence
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Chinese tech unicorn 01.AI admits ‘oversight’ in changing name of AI model built on Meta Platforms’ Llama system

  • Beijing-based 01.AI said the company made several name changes in its open-source large language model’s code as part of experimental requirements
  • The firm has decided to change the so-called tensor name of its AI model Yi-34B to reflect that it was built on Meta Platforms’ Llama system

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An inquiry has found that Beijing-based start-up 01.AI’s artificial intelligence large language model, Yi-34B, was built on the architecture of Meta Platforms’ Llama system. Photo: Shutterstock
Ben Jiangin Beijing
A Chinese tech unicorn founded by Taiwanese venture capitalist and computer scientist Lee Kai-fu has decided to change the tensor name of its open-source artificial intelligence (AI) large language model (LLM) Yi-34B, following an inquiry that revealed it was based on the architecture of Meta Platforms’ Llama system.
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Beijing-based 01.AI, whose value has reached more than US$1 billion in less than eight months since it was founded, on Tuesday described the matter as “an oversight” and that the tensor name of its LLM – the technology used to train intelligent chatbots like ChatGPT – would be changed to reflect that it was built on Meta’s LLM, according to a post on the Hugging Face open-source community platform by 01.AI’s open-source director Richard Lin, who responded to an earlier query by AI researcher Eric Hartford.

Tensors are data containers in the AI machine-learning process that hold and arrange information in a structured manner, making it easier for LLMs to understand and generate humanlike text.

LLMs are deep-learning AI algorithms that can recognise, summarise, translate, predict and generate content using very large data sets.

Lee Kai-fu, the co-founder, chairman and chief executive of Sinovation Ventures, in May founded Beijing-based start-up 01.AI, which reached a valuation of more than US$1 billion after its latest funding round. Photo: SCMP
Lee Kai-fu, the co-founder, chairman and chief executive of Sinovation Ventures, in May founded Beijing-based start-up 01.AI, which reached a valuation of more than US$1 billion after its latest funding round. Photo: SCMP

“During extensive training experiments, we made several renamings in the code to meet experimental requirements,” 01.AI’s Lin said in his post on Tuesday. “But we kinda dropped the ball and didn’t switch them back before pushing out our release … We’re sorry for the confusion.”

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The company said in a response to the Post via WeChat on Wednesday that it changed the tensor name of its Yi-34B LLM to “fully test the [Llama] model” and that there was no intention to mask the source of the AI model.

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