The west wind blows from Aofei Temple

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Ali Tongyi Qianwen Big Model Technical BackboneZhou Chang, it was revealed that he will resign and start his own business!

According to insiders, although Zhou Chang is still in the Alibaba Cloud system and has not officially resigned, he has confirmed his intention to leave.

In the next step, Zhou Chang may aim to start an AI application business, but the specific direction is still unknown.

As a senior algorithm expert at Alibaba for seven years, the news that Zhou Chang is leaving the company has attracted widespread attention in the industry.

It is reported that the research and development and open source work of Tongyi's big model are still continuing as normal, and the head of Tongyi Laboratory is Alibaba Cloud CTO Zhou Jingren.

Recently, many AI backbones of large companies have been exposed to go solo, and many entrepreneurial projects have gradually surfaced. The entrepreneurial wave caused by AI is still continuing.

A witness to the development of Tongyi Model

Zhou Chang, nicknamed Zhong Huang, is one of the technical backbones of Alibaba Tongyi Qianwen's big model. He and his team have launched a series of language models and multimodal models.

The team's research results have also won many honors including the First Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress from the China Electronics Society.

In 2012, Zhou Chang graduated from Fudan University's Department of Computer Science and Technology, and then entered Peking University, where he obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Software and Theory in 2017.

The main research directions include graph representation learning and reasoning, recommendation systems, distributed graph computing, etc.

data shows that,2017In July, Zhou Chang joined Alibaba and served as a senior algorithm expert at the Intelligent Computing Laboratory of the DAMO Academy.

During his time at Alibaba, Zhou Chang achieved fruitful academic results, with a number of his papers included in major conferences and cited over 8,000 times on Google Scholar:

In the seven years from 2017 to the present, Zhou Chang has witnessed and participated in the key evolution of Alibaba's big model.

As a representative of large models in China, Alibaba initially launched a series of large models such as structBERT and M6. Until now, the Tongyi Qianwen model family has gradually grown. In May this year, the Tongyi Qianwen model has evolved toTongyi Qianwen 2.5。

The question "Which is bigger, 9.11 or 9.9?" that has recently stumped a number of large models and has been trending on Weibo did not stump Tongyi Qianwen 2.5 in the test of Quantum Bit.

In the comments section of the article related to Quantum Bit, many netizens also said that Tongyi Qianwen can successfully answer the questions:

Alibaba's open source model series is also continuously updated.

In August last year, Tongyi announced that it would join the open source ranks, and subsequently launched more than a dozen models with parameter sizes ranging from 500 million to 110 billion.

The visual understanding model Qwen-VL, audio understanding model Qwen-Audio, code model CodeQwen1.5-7B, and mixed expert model Qwen1.5-MoE are also open source.

At present, the download volume of Tongyi open source model series has exceeded 7 million.

In June this year, AlitongyiqianwenOpen SourceThe big model has evolvedQwen2Its performance surpassed the open source benchmark Llama 3 in all aspects. Two hours after its release, it topped the HggingFace open source large model list.

According to insiders, Zhou Chang resigned.The research and development and open source work of Tongyi's big model will continue as normal.The head of Tongyi Laboratory is Zhou Jingren.

AI giants start-up companies emerge one after another

In addition to Zhou Chang, many core backbones of large companies have been reported to have resigned recently, and the entrepreneurial projects of many bigwigs have also been made public.

In the past two days, former Vice President of Baidu Research Institute and Director of Baidu Cognitive Computing LaboratoryLi PingIt was revealed that he resigned and founded a company focusing on AI infrastructure, called vecml, and served as CEO.

“AI Godmother”Fei-Fei LiThere is also new news about World Labs, a first-time startup that has surpassed a valuation of $1 billion, becoming a new unicorn in less than four months.

△The latest progress of Fei-Fei Li's laboratory in the field of space intelligence

Going back further, former Ant Group Vice PresidentQi YuanThe entrepreneurial direction was revealed, and the big model company Infinite Light Years was established in parallel with industry, academia and research, and it was revealed that it was aiming at "trustworthy big models".

Li Mu, resigned from the position of chief scientist at Amazon and co-founded Boson.ai, which has now launched its first large-scale model results.

A number of engineers have also resigned from Google, Deepmind and other companies to start their own businesses in multiple directions around large models.

Founding member of OpenAI, former head of Tesla AIAndrej Karpathy(Kapasi)Recently, he officially announced that he had started a business and joined Eureka Labs, a new AI-native school.

The big guys have joined the game, adding many new variables to the future big model landscape.