During the opening ceremony of the 2024 Yunqi Conference held today, Wu Yongming, director and CEO of Alibaba Group, as well as chairman and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Group, delivered a speech sharing profound insights on the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He revealed that over the past year, the call price for the Tongyi Qianwen API on Alibaba Cloud's Bai Lian has dramatically dropped by 97%, with the cost of calling one million tokens now as low as 0.5 yuan, and Alibaba Cloud will continue to strive to reduce costs.

In today's rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence, AI video generation technology has reached a significant milestone. Runway from New York and Luma AI from San Francisco have almost simultaneously launched their respective video generation APIs to the market, providing developers and businesses with unprecedented creative tools and attracting widespread attention in the industry. Runway's Gen-3Alpha Turbo AI video model API was the first to be unveiled. This product is currently in a phased rollout, initially accessible only to select partners.

Recently, the French startup Poolside has garnered significant attention. The company focuses on developing artificial intelligence technology aimed at assisting in software development. Despite the fact that their initial product has not yet been released, they are already discussing a new round of funding, with a valuation expected to reach 3 billion USD. Image source note: image generated by AI, image authorized by service provider Midjourney. According to informed sources, Poolside plans to raise nearly 500 million USD, with existing investor Bain Capital Ventures.

Recently, reports have emerged that the UAE's sovereign investment company MGX is considering participating in a multi-billion dollar financing round for OpenAI. According to The Wall Street Journal, MGX has not yet determined the specific amount of its investment, while OpenAI is seeking to raise $6.5 billion and increase the company's valuation to $150 billion. This financing plan has the support of venture capital firm Thrive Capital, and Microsoft may also be involved, given its engagement since 2019.

OpenAI has launched the brand new model series GPT-o1, which exhibits exceptional reasoning abilities. Compared to previous models, its performance is highly anticipated. GPT-o1: Enhanced Reasoning Capabilities is a series of new reasoning models designed to help solve complex problems. These models are specially trained to take more time to think before responding, enabling them to tackle more challenging issues than ever in fields such as science, coding, and mathematics. GPT-o1 will first be available in ChatGPT and A.

Sequoia Capital partner Pat Grady stated that future billion-dollar AI companies are more likely to emerge from application software rather than foundational model development. Although Sequoia has invested about $150 million in foundational models like OpenAI and xAI, its application layer investments are significantly higher. Grady emphasized the need for AI startups to design products atop models to meet market demands, expressing optimism abo....

Recently, Kuaishou's Keling AI announced a strategic partnership with Blue Focus. The two parties will collaborate closely in several areas, including the research and development of AI video generation technology, platform cooperation, scene co-creation, and content creation optimization. Keling AI is Kuaishou's self-developed next-generation AI creative productivity tool, offering AI video, AI images, and related controllable editing capabilities. Since its launch, Keling AI has undergone multiple product and function updates and was opened to global users on July 24. Currently, Keling AI provides creators with both web and mobile access.

Kimi Smart Assistant, a subsidiary of Beijing Yue's Dark Side Technology Co., Ltd., recently announced that its Kimi API now supports online search functionality. This marks a significant enhancement in the interactive experience, allowing users to retrieve information from the Internet via the API. This update to the Kimi API enables developers to leverage this feature, allowing applications to 'surf the web' by automatically performing online searches and providing answers when encountering questions during conversations.

Biotechnology company Chai Discovery has received nearly $30 million in investment from Thrive Capital and OpenAI within six months of its founding. The company focuses on the application of biotechnology in drug development, developing innovative technologies that can predict biochemical molecular structures and reprogram molecular interactions, aiming to transform biology into 'engineering.' Chai Discovery's goal is to accelerate and optimize the drug development process by enhancing drug molecule design through technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

RapidLayoutRecover is an innovative document image processing tool designed to efficiently convert scanned documents or PDF pages into editable Word or TXT text formats. Its core advantage lies in the intelligent automatic recognition capability, which can accurately identify elements such as text, tables, and formulas, automatically complete layout analysis, and extract content, significantly saving users time and effort. The tool quickly classifies document orientation, conducts detailed layout analysis, and recognizes text, tables, and formulas, achieving conversion from document images to structured TXT.

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla's remarks have sparked heated debate, claiming that '100% of AI unicorns are built on OpenAI's API.' This statement has been met with opposition from netizens, who pointed out that multiple AI models, including Claude, Anthropic, Mistral, and Meta's Llama, do not entirely rely on OpenAI technology. In the discussion, some users drew an analogy to the electric vehicle market, emphasizing that different AI unicorns may have their own unique technologies.

Mayfield Fund has announced the launch of the AI Garage project, providing up to $100 million in support for AI partner startups, aimed at helping early-stage entrepreneurs turn their ideas into fundable companies. This program is distinct from other accelerators, recruiting a maximum of five entrepreneurs every six months and offering guidance and support within the company's office. Participants can receive funding ranging from $1 million to $5 million after their business plans are formulated. AI partners are defined as digital companions capable of collaborating with humans to enhance work efficiency across various industries, including product and engineering.

Recently, Zhiyu AI's subsidiary, Beijing Zhiyu Huazhang Technology Co., Ltd., has increased its registered capital from approximately 25.11 million yuan to 27.9 million yuan, highlighting the company's growth potential. Established in 2019, Zhiyu Huazhang focuses on artificial intelligence software development, particularly in theoretical and algorithmic domains, continuously driving industry innovation. Its shareholder roster includes several well-known companies, including Tencent, providing the company with financial and resource support. Recently, Zhiyu Huazhang has released several internationally leading artificial intelligence models, including language and text generation.

Dongyi Technology, a humanoid robot company established in June 2024, has completed an angel round financing of tens of millions, led by Fengrui Capital and Z Fund, with several well-known investment institutions participating. The company's founder, Ren Xiaoyu, has extensive experience in bipedal humanoid robots and reinforcement learning development. Currently, humanoid robots excel in performing single tasks but face challenges in achieving diverse and generalized actions, limiting their potential for integration with multimodal large models. Dongyi Technology is committed to developing innovative behavioral AI agents and a new generation of humanoid robots.

On September 2nd, Tongyi Qwen announced the open sourcing of its second-generation visual language model Qwen2-VL, and launched APIs for the 2B and 7B sizes as well as their quantized versions on the Aliyun Bailian platform for direct user access. The Qwen2-VL model achieves comprehensive performance improvements in several areas. It can understand images of different resolutions and aspect ratios, setting global leading performance on benchmarks such as DocVQA, RealWorldQA, and MTVQA.

AI infrastructure startup 'Wu Wen Xin Qiong' announced the completion of nearly 500 million Yuan in Series A financing, setting the record for the largest single financing amount for domestic AI Infra startups. This round was co-led by the Social Security Fund Zhongguancun Independent Innovation Fund, Qiming Venture Partners, and Hongtai Fund, with participation from strategic investors including Lenovo Capital, Xiaomi, and Softcom. The funds will primarily be used to enhance talent acquisition, deepen technology research and development, drive product commercialization, and strengthen ecosystem collaboration. 'Wu Wen Xin Qiong' was established just 16 months ago.

GPT-4, OpenAI's language model, passed the Japanese National Physical Therapist Exam without additional training, achieving an accuracy rate of 73.4%. It excelled in handling pure text questions with an accuracy of 80.5%, but performed poorly in solving practical problems and dealing with questions containing images and tables, with accuracy rates of 46.6% and 35.4%, respectively. The research reveals the limitations of AI in certain areas, particularly in understanding complex contexts and visual information. Despite being trained on English data, GPT-4 still performed effectively when processing Japanese input.

Recently, Wired magazine reported that Apple's content-scraping bot, Applebot, has faced collective resistance from multiple major media outlets, including well-known platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, The New York Times, and The Financial Times, which have chosen to block Applebot and deny it access to their website content. This phenomenon reflects the complex situation in the field of AI content scraping and the media industry's complicated attitude towards AI technology. Research shows that approximately 6% to 7% of websites have blocked Applebot, while up to

OpenAI, known for its innovative AI research and the influence of ChatGPT, is actively seeking a new round of funding with a target valuation of up to $100 billion, potentially making it one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. This funding round is expected to raise billions of dollars, with venture capital firm Thrive Capital and tech giant Microsoft showing strong interest, potentially investing $1 billion and over $13 billion, respectively. OpenAI's valuation has rapidly increased over the past few years, rising from $86 billion at the end of 2022.

Recently, Kimi Open Platform launched the moonshot-v1-auto Model API, which automatically selects the optimal model to save costs. Additionally, it has updated features such as account password login, phone number replacement, and balance warning functions to enhance user experience. In the future, a connected search function will be introduced to strengthen API capabilities and provide developers with more innovative opportunities.