(Yicai) June 6 -- The chief executive officer of Model Best has resigned from his position as chief technology officer of Chinese question-and-answer platform Zhihu to focus on the Chinese artificial intelligence startup.

Li Dahai will dedicate himself to the development of Model Best, whose open-source large language model was recently found to have been plagiarized by an AI team from Stanford University, Zhihu announced yesterday. Li will continue to serve as one of Zhihu’s directors.

Sun Bin, former vice president of iQiyi, has replaced Li as the new CTO of Zhihu, effective immediately, the Beijing-based firm added. Before joining the Chinese video site, Sun served as deputy general manager of online game developer Perfect World’s education business. He also worked at Microsoft and Yahoo.

Li joined Zhihu in 2015 and was appointed CTO three years later. Zhihu became an angel investor of Model Best in April last year, and Li was appointed Model Best’s CEO a few months later.

An AI team of students from Stanford University was recently found to have plagiarized Model Best’s LLM MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5 code for its Llama3-V project. Two of the students apologized on social media X on June 4.

Li said in response that he deeply regrets plagiarism and urges developing an open, cooperative, and trusting community environment. The issue shows the recognition of MiniCPM by international teams, but in an unexpected way, Li noted.

Editor: Futura Costaglione