Under the tutelage of various AI masters in China and the United States, Zhang Yiming's attention, valuation of 300 million US dollars... Genius Yang Zhilin finally owns his company

Author｜Oil Vinegar

Responsible editor｜Wang Zhaoyang

Source丨Pinwan

Image credit: Generated by Unbounded AI tools

Yang Zhilin sat in front of Zhang Yiming.

When preparing for Toutiao in 2012, China Mobile Internet was in its prime. Zhang Yiming, a young product manager, found success on Facebook and traveled thousands of miles to inspect the US headquarters of Microsoft and Starbucks. At that time, Zhang Yiming was still under 30 years old. young engineer.

The world is changing fast. In China in 2023, ChatGPT is on the rise, and the mobile Internet is exhausted. When the latter seems to be an old thing that needs to be rescued by generative AI, Zhang Yiming, who is no longer in front of ByteDance, returns to Beijing again to meet people crazily and make up AI lessons. One of the young juniors he "asked" in March and April this year was Yang Zhilin from Circular Intelligence.

The same 30-year-old age. History is always similar.

Recently, The Information, a highly influential technology media in Silicon Valley, has listed five candidates that it believes may become "China's OpenAI", including MiniMax, Zhipu AI, Light Years Beyond and Lanzhou Technology, and the other position is Yang Zhilin, others are companies, and he is directly an individual.

This makes people feel that everyone seems to be looking forward to his "solo flight". It is understood that before communicating with Zhang Yiming, Yang Zhilin already had a clear plan to start a business.

This plan was officially announced with the recent emergence of an AI start-up company called "Dark Side of the Moon". Sequoia China and ZhenFund stand behind this company, which aims to focus on AGI. The market valuation has been revealed to be around US$300 million. As the main founder, Yang Zhilin holds 84.92% of the shares this time.

The treasure is all on Yang Zhilin.

"disappear"

A source close to Yang Zhilin revealed that before he decided to start an AI business, he "disappeared" for two weeks at the end of last year. People around only know that he went to Silicon Valley, but no one can contact him except those who are very close.

Only two papers can be used to measure the depth of Yang Zhilin's algorithm research, and his intersection with Silicon Valley is also included.

"Transformer-XL: Attentive language models beyond a fixed-length context" published in early 2019 proposed an attentional language model beyond a fixed-length context, and for the first time introduced two key mechanisms, the loop mechanism and the relative position encoding, to To deal with the problem that traditional language models such as Transformer are limited in length when processing long texts, they cannot effectively capture long-distance dependencies.

Half a year later, "XLNet: Generalized autoregressive pretraining for language understanding" proposed a new "autoregressive + autoregressive filtering" pretraining method to solve the problems in traditional language modeling to better capture the above information and improve It improves the ability of the model to deal with long-distance dependencies.

The two papers have far-reaching influence in the field of deep learning, and the sum of the citations in Google Scholar has reached an astonishing tens of thousands of times.

Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain, also participated in the research of these two papers. Yang Zhilin called Quoc Le his "mentor at Google." Later in his Ph.D., he worked at Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research Institute and Google Brain Research Institute. In addition to the important founder of Google in the field of artificial intelligence, Yang Zhilin's collaborators in algorithm research also include Yann LeCun, the three giants of deep learning who won the Turing Award, and Yoshua Bengio (the other is Geoffrey Hinton).

In the past, during his undergraduate studies in computer science at Tsinghua University, he studied under Professor Tang Jie, one of the most famous AI researchers in China. When he was a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), he studied under Apple AI research leader Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Google Chief scientist William Cohen. It took him 4 years to complete the CMU doctoral program that usually takes 6 years. During this period, he published more than 20 papers in top conferences such as ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, and EMNLP.

"He's a genius," said a person who communicates with him regularly. "Very clever."

All imaginations about natural language are expanding exponentially in Silicon Valley. After Yang Zhilin returned to China in 2019, he was in charge of the pure algorithm research and development and led the company's product manager team in Loop Intelligence. This AI company, which he, Chen Qicong, Jiebao and Zhang Yutao established as early as 2016, officially started to promote it three years after its establishment. commercialize.

If the previous experience in Silicon Valley was still related to circular intelligence, then this time when he came back from Silicon Valley at the beginning of this year is completely different. According to people familiar with the matter, Yang Zhilin, who "disappeared" and returned, has plans to start a new business.

Everything is coming towards Yang Zhilin

"Dark Side of the Moon", this is one of Pink Floyd's most famous albums, the cover is the classic dark triangle and rainbow dispersion pattern.

In the lyrics of the first song in the album, there is a line that is exactly like Yang Zhilin, who formed a band when he was a student, is in the current situation.

"Look around and choose your own ground. (Look around and choose your own ground)"

Circular intelligence, which focuses on technology marketing (SalesTech), will not have much room for imagination in 2023 in this new world that has been turned upside down by generative AI. Exceeded the valuation of circular intelligence. But this new entrepreneurial story that jumped out of the loop actually still has ties to the old company.

For example, the technical team of more than a dozen people led by Yang Zhilin in the period of circular intelligence all followed the former leader to the new company this time. But the office location of the dark side of the whole moon is still in the office space of circular intelligence.

For example, a former employee of Loop Intelligence revealed that the results of all algorithm research in the ToB field of the dark side of the future will only be poured into Loop Intelligence, not other companies.

To a certain extent, this is a shell-changing story. There is too little room for imagination in the recycling smart business, so there is not much financing ability. ToB's business is too restrictive for a mind like Yang Zhilin, he needs a place where he can let go.

If the role of the capital behind it is included, it is more like a second venture that must be completed, and the protagonist must be Yang Zhilin.

"The story of circulation can no longer support a larger valuation. It is also the idea of old shareholders and investors to let Yang Zhilin spin off from circulation." The aforementioned source told Pinwan.

What makes these operations more necessary is the high-valued financing founded by Wang Huiwen, which is light years away. Wang Huiwen, who called out the concept of China's OpenAI in a high-profile manner, completed a financing of US$1 billion for his company light years away, which completely aroused the anxiety of Chinese investors and set a high value for the valuation of this wave of generative AI entrepreneurship. Frame of reference—a frame of reference far superior to that of circular intelligence.

Sequoia and ZhenFund, which are the leaders in the public information this time, are themselves old shareholders of Circular Intelligence. The angel investment of 50 million US dollars was confirmed after the year. A large number of VCs tried to contact Yang Zhilin to discuss joining in the early stage of the project, but it is understood that the latter did not even pass these hot and gold-encrusted friend requests.

Another clue that there is still a connection between the dark side of the moon and Circular Intelligent Time is that Zhang Yutao, who appeared with Yang Zhilin in the founding team lineup of the dark side of the moon, has not resigned as the CTO of Circular Intelligent.

The other two of the four-person founding team are Zhou Xinyu and Wang Zhen. The former, like Yang Zhilin and Zhang Yutao, was born in the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University, and later did algorithm research in Megvii; Wang Zhen is the only one among the four who does not have a Tsinghua background, but is the only one among the four who has experience in investment institutions.

But when it comes to the dark side of the moon, Zhou Xinyu, who has the highest shareholding ratio among the latter three, only holds 10%, and Yang Zhilin, the largest shareholder of the company, holds 84.92%.

Obviously, this investment is all for Yang Zhilin, and the dark side of the moon will be a company completely controlled by him. A genius has been liberated, and it's time to prove himself.