Today, in response to rumors that ByteDance might initiate a price war for large models, Douyin Vice President Li Liang issued a statement on social media, clearly stating that this is not a price war. Li Liang pointed out that the Doubao large model has reduced costs through technological innovation, with significant optimizations in algorithms, software engineering, and hardware solutions. He mentioned that the pricing of 0.3 yuan per 1,000 tokens not only has a considerable gross profit but also follows a transparent pricing strategy, which is not the traditional 'list price discount' model.

On December 18, 2024, ZhiYuan Research Institute signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Tencent Group, aiming for in-depth collaboration in several areas, including large model research and development, exploration of cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies, and open-source ecosystem construction. According to the cooperation agreement, ZhiYuan Research Institute and Tencent will leverage their respective strengths to promote the deep integration of large model technology and industrial scenarios, and explore technological solutions for large model training and inference optimization in diverse computing environments. Both parties are also committed to building an open and innovative hardware and software ecosystem to foster the development and application of technologies.

At the recent Geek Park IF2025 Innovation Conference, Wang Xiaochuan, founder and CEO of BaiChuan Intelligence, had a dialogue with Zhang Peng, founder of Geek Park, elaborating on his in-depth thoughts on the medical field, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), and technological progress. Wang Xiaochuan reflected on his original intention to choose the medical sector, which is both a dream of his involvement in life sciences and a decision made after rational consideration. As early as 2000, during his graduate studies, Wang Xiaochuan began to engage with life sciences and developed a strong interest in the mathematical models behind life.

Beijing Mianbi Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. recently announced the completion of a new financing round of hundreds of millions of RMB. This round was jointly led by Loongson Venture Capital, Dinghui Baifu, Zhongguancun Science City Fund, and Sequoia Capital. The Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund and Qiming Venture Partners participated as co-investors, with Wanjia Capital acting as the exclusive financial advisor. Mianbi Intelligence plans to use this funding to accelerate the commercialization of terminal-side AI large models, aiming to provide high-performance, low-energy consumption, and faster large model services under the same parameters to deeply serve the industry and create tangible value for users.

Recently, Beijing Xiaoyu Intelligent Manufacturing Technology Co., Ltd., the first large model robot company invested by Xiaomi, announced the completion of its A round financing worth 100 million yuan. Xiaoyu Intelligent Manufacturing was founded in 2023 by the core founding team of Xiaomi Group. The founder, Qiao Zhongliang, was one of Xiaomi's initial members and served as the head of MIUI development; the co-founder, Wang Wenlin, previously served as the general manager of Xiaomi's software system platform department, leading the development of the 'Xiaomi Brain.' Source note: The image is generated by AI, sourced from Midjourney, which focuses on the industrial sector.

Tao Lin, Vice President of Tesla, issued a statement today reiterating the company's commitment to the development path of autonomous driving technology. Lin mentioned that several years ago, company founder Elon Musk determined that only through pure vision technology can we achieve safer and smarter fully autonomous driving. She explained that because existing road and traffic rules are designed based on human vision, the combination of cameras, visual neural networks, and autonomous driving hardware can best mimic human observation, perception, and decision-making habits, potentially reaching or even surpassing human driving capabilities.

Recently, WPS Office launched its AI voice transcription feature, which is enhanced by WPS AI technology and deeply integrated with WPS cloud documents, providing users with a faster, more accurate, and smarter voice-to-text experience. This new feature not only supports real-time recording and audio import for voice-to-text conversion but also enables translations between multiple languages, including Chinese and English, ensuring the integrity of recording files. Even if there is an unexpected exit during the recording process, users can return to the task and continue recording.

At the 2024 World Baidu Conference, Baidu founder Li Yanhong presented a series of eye-catching advancements in the field of AI. He pointed out that the most significant breakthrough in large model technology over the past two years has been the basic resolution of the 'illusion' problem, marking a qualitative leap in the accuracy of AI responses, transforming it from 'seriously spouting nonsense' to a reliable intelligent assistant. At the conference, Li Yanhong emphasized Baidu's latest retrieval-augmented generation technology, iRAG, which innovatively integrates the vast image resources accumulated by Baidu's search platform and advanced techniques.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT and Llama have sparked a revolution in the field of artificial intelligence, but efficiently training these massive models while aligning them with human values remains a challenge. Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has become an important training method for LLMs in recent years, but traditional RLHF frameworks have limitations in flexibility, efficiency, and scalability. To address these issues, the ByteDance Doubao Large Model Team has open-sourced an RLHF framework called HybridFlow.

On October 30, Mianbi Intelligence announced a strategic partnership with Baidu Intelligent Cloud, aiming to jointly develop collaborative solutions for large models. According to the partnership agreement, the two parties will leverage Baidu Intelligent Cloud's Qianfan Large Model Platform, Wenxin series large models, as well as Mianbi's MiniCPM series edge large models and cutting-edge technology accumulation across multiple terminals and different scenarios, to collaboratively develop and promote edge-cloud collaborative technology solutions that further enhance the performance of large models in practical applications such as embodied intelligence, smart terminals, and edge computing, while reducing the inference costs of large models.

Is AI actually starting to ‘get smarter’?! The latest research from MIT indicates that the internal structure of large language models (LLMs) astonishingly resembles that of the human brain! This study utilized sparse autoencoder techniques to conduct an in-depth analysis of the activation space of LLMs, revealing three hierarchical structural features that are truly remarkable: first, at the microscopic level, researchers discovered the existence of structures akin to ‘crystals’. The surfaces of these ‘crystals’ are composed of parallelograms or trapezoids, similar to familiar lexical analogies such as ‘man:’

On October 24, Xpeng Motors held the 'Xpeng P7+ AI Driving Technology Sharing Conference and the Launch of AI Tianji 5.4.0' in Guangzhou, announcing that the P7+ and subsequent models will come standard with AI advanced smart driving without the need for optional purchases, subscriptions, or additional fees. Dr. Li Liyun, Vice President and Head of Autonomous Driving at Xpeng Motors, emphasized that building a cloud-based large model is the key to success in the smart driving competition. Xpeng Motors chose the same path as OpenAI from the research phase, which is to first build a powerful 'cloud-based large model'.

On October 22, Baidu released the top ten frontier technology inventions of 2024 in Beijing, highlighting multiple innovative native applications of artificial intelligence and high-value patent outcomes. Among these frontier technological inventions, 'large models' emerged as a prominent keyword, showcasing Baidu's in-depth research and application in this field.

According to media reports, Tan Xu, former Chief Research Manager at Microsoft Research Asia, joined the startup Dark Side of the Moon in August, primarily responsible for developing end-to-end speech models. One important goal after Tan's joining is to create a speech experience similar to GPT-4o for the company. Dark Side of the Moon has not yet responded, but insiders have confirmed Tan's employment, and specific position details have not been finalized. Public information indicates that Tan Xu's research areas include deep learning, language/speech/music processing, and AI content generation, with publications in AI academic conferences.

Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post are suing AI-driven search startup Perplexity for using their news content to train its large language model. The publications from these two news groups accuse Perplexity of copyright infringement by generating answers to people's queries using their articles, thereby diverting traffic from the publications' websites. 'This lawsuit is brought by news publishers seeking compensation as Perplexity openly plans to provide services for free.'