By YU Hao
WANG Xing, founder and CEO of tech giant Meituan is to personally invest in an AI company his good friend WANG Huiwen founded in February.
Wang Xing didn’t say how much he is investing, but he will become an executive of Wang Huiwen's newly founded Guang Nian Zhi Wai (Light Years Away).
“I’m both excited and worried about the effect that large AI models will have in the future,” Wang Xing said. “Huiwen and I have been fighting together for two decades, if he decides to go with the tide of the times, I will support him.”
It is not surprising that Wang Xing is interested in Guang Nian Zhi Wai. As an investor, he poured money into Li Auto and crowdfunding platform Shuidichou in their early stages. Both were considered innovative and somehow risky, and both founders were close friends of Wang Xing’s.
Wang Xing and Wang Huiwen were friends at Tsinghua University 25 years ago. Together, they founded the Facebook-like SNS platform Xiaonei in 2005. And in 2010, the pair started Meituan. Wang Huiwen retired from Meituan in 2020. At the time Wang Xing said Huiwen was his “lifelong friend.”
Wang Huiwen was widely doubted when he said he would personally offer US$50 million to make Guang Nian Zhi Wai the Chinese version of OpenAI.
The cost of training GPT-3 is about US$4.6 million, for some more sophisticated large language models, the cost mounts up to US$12 million. US$50 is far from enough to train a chatbot.
