Former head of Google China joins ChatGPT frenzy by starting own venture
- Lee, who heads investment fund Sinovation Ventures, said the new company will focus on AI 2.0 platforms and productivity applications
- Since February, a number of China’s big tech companies have rushed to announce that they are working on AI products similar to ChatGPT
Lee Kai-fu, a prominent Chinese venture capitalist and former president of Google China, is the latest high-profile tech executive to jump on the ChatGPT bandwagon, with plans to establish an artificial intelligence (AI) company that goes beyond “a Chinese version of ChatGPT”.
Lee, 61, chairman of China-based early-stage investment fund Sinovation Ventures, said the company, called Project AI 2.0, aims to become a global tech firm that “builds AI 2.0 platforms and productivity applications”.
He emphasised that the company was “not only a Chinese version of ChatGPT”, referring to the AI chatbot developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which has now been upgraded to the more powerful ChatGPT-4 version.
Lee made the announcement on Sunday on his WeChat social media account, which is widely read in China.
In his post, Lee said AI 2.0 was “not just a high-performance chatting tool”, nor was it limited to AI-generated graphics and texts. The applications that are available today, including Co-pilot, Microsoft’s newly-launched feature that integrates AI into its Office products, are “just the beginning of AI 2.0 capabilities”, according to Lee.
The announcement follows the entry of Chinese search engine giant Baidu into the market with its ChatGPT-like service called Ernie Bot. Baidu’s stock price tumbled 6.4 per cent in Hong Kong after a lacklustre debut last Thursday, but has since surged 13.7 per cent after it received recognition from reviewers and investment bankers on Friday.
