01.AI is a Beijing-based artificial-intelligence company founded in 2023 by Kai-Fu Lee, the computer scientist and former head of Google China. The company reached a valuation above US$1 billion - unicorn status - within roughly eight months of its founding.
Its first major release was the Yi model family, open-sourced in November 2023 under the Apache 2.0 license. The Yi-6B and Yi-34B base models were trained from scratch on a 3-trillion-token bilingual English-Chinese corpus, using a Transformer architecture similar to Llama’s but with the company’s own data and training infrastructure. At release, 01.AI said Yi-34B ranked first among open-source models on the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard and the Chinese C-Eval benchmark, and the chat variant later placed second behind GPT-4 Turbo on AlpacaEval.
Why business readers should care: 01.AI is part of the wave of well-funded Chinese labs - alongside Alibaba’s Qwen, Zhipu AI, and DeepSeek - that chose to compete by releasing capable open-weight models, expanding the global pool of freely usable AI well beyond Western firms.