companies

01.AI

Beijing lab founded by Kai-Fu Lee building the open Yi model family and the free Wanzhi productivity assistant for the Chinese market.

01.AI was founded in 2023 by Kai-Fu Lee, the former Google China and Microsoft executive who had previously built the venture firm Sinovation Ventures, with a stated goal of combining foundation models with consumer-facing applications under one roof. Within eight months of launch, the open-source Yi-34B model helped push 01.AI to a reported $1 billion valuation, backed by investors including Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi. The Yi family spans open-weight releases such as Yi-34B and Yi-Coder alongside the closed, trillion-parameter Yi-Large served through 01.AI's API at a fraction of GPT-4 Turbo's per-token price. In 2024 the company also launched Wanzhi, a free Chinese-language productivity assistant for meeting transcription, document summarization, and office tasks, positioned as a domestic alternative to Microsoft Copilot. By 2025 and into 2026, Lee has publicly steered 01.AI away from chasing frontier-model scale — citing the capital intensity of that race — and toward selling AI systems and advisory services to governments and large enterprises across Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

Founded

2023

Headquarters

Beijing, China

Sector

lab