01.AI (零一萬物)

An AI startup founded by Kai-Fu Lee in 2023, builder of the Yi (易) open-source bilingual model family — based in Beijing with a strong technical team and high profile.

01.AI (零一萬物) is an AI company founded in 2023 by Kai-Fu Lee, the well-known Taiwanese-American technologist (former president of Google China, founder of Sinovation Ventures, and author of "AI Superpowers"). The company is headquartered in Beijing and has assembled a senior team of researchers from Microsoft, Google, and other top labs. Their model line is named Yi (易, "easy" or "change" in Chinese). It matters because 01.AI was one of the first credible Chinese open-source LLM efforts, and the Yi-34B model (late 2023) was for a brief period the highest-ranked open-source model on Hugging Face leaderboards. The company has high visibility because of Kai-Fu Lee's profile and because it positioned itself early as a Chinese answer to OpenAI / Anthropic. Key products: Yi-6B, Yi-34B (open-source), Yi-Large, Yi-Lightning (commercial frontier), bilingual chat assistant Yi (萬知, wanzhi), and a multimodal vision variant Yi-VL. The company has also been active in international markets — Yi models are released openly under permissive licenses on Hugging Face. With the rise of DeepSeek and Qwen, 01.AI's market share has been pressured but the team remains technically respected. They are one of the "AI six tigers" along with Moonshot, Zhipu, Baichuan, MiniMax, and Stepfun. Related: Yi model, Kai-Fu Lee, Chinese AI, open-source.