01.AI was founded in March 2023 by former
Microsoft and
Google executive and
Sinovation Ventures co-founder
Kai-Fu Lee. The Chinese name of 01.AI means "zero-one, everything", alluding to a passage from the Taoist text
Tao Te Ching. External backers of 01.AI include
Alibaba Group and
Xiaomi. Due to
US export controls on semiconductors, 01.AI began amassing the semiconductors earlier in the year and even borrowed money from Sinovation Ventures to fund the purchases. In November 2024, it was reported that 01.AI trained its AI models with just 2,000 GPUs. The cost was $3 million compared to OpenAI's $80-100 million. In January 2025, Lee denied rumours that 01.AI was negotiating to sell its pre-training team to
Alibaba Cloud. In March 2025, 01.AI stopped “pre-training” large language models to focus on selling tailored AI business solutions using
DeepSeek’s models. == Products ==