(photo source: Baidu wenxin AI photo/titanium media App editor)

Sora, an AI video generation tool product released by US OpenAI company on February 15, has aroused global heated discussion and attention.

titanium media App, February 17, Zhou Hongyi, founder of 360, talked about his views on Sora on the 16th. He said Sora means that the realization of general artificial intelligence (AI) could be shortened from 10 years to one year, and said OpenAl should still have some secret weapons in its hands, whether it's GPT-5, or machine self-learning to automatically generate content, "they don't have all the weapons in their hands. So it seems that the AI gap between China and the United States may still be widening."

Xu siqing, founding partner and CEO of alpha commune, also mentioned similar views. he also believed that the emergence of Sora had further widened the AI gap between China and the United States.

In fact, since the ChatGPT came out at the end of 2022, it has caused a new round of global AI boom. In the past year, there has been a huge "contrast" in the direction of capital and technology in the AI field between China and the United States ".

from the secondary market, the shares of many American AI companies rose sharply in 2023. Among them, Supermicro (Ultramicro Computer) has increased by more than 770 percent in the past 12 months, while the overall increase is more than 100 times. Chip giant Avida rose nearly five times, with its market value climbing to $1.79 trillion, surpassing Amazon and Google to become the world's third largest technology stock. ARM rose three times, AMD rose more than 120 percent, and Intel rose more than 58 percent; microsoft, on the other hand, doubled its ChatGPT stock and overtook Apple to become the world's most valuable technology giant.

It's clear that the Wall Street capital markets are already paying for this AI craze. In less than 15 months, thanks to generative AI, these companies have increased their market capitalization by trillions of dollars.

Not only at the corporate level, but also at the corporate CEO level. According to Bloomberg, almost all of the wealth gained by billionaires in the United States this year is related to AI.

According to Bloomberg data, 30 of the world's top 500 richest individuals hold wealth that has benefited from AI, and most of them are American entrepreneurs. So far this year, their net assets have increased by a total of $124 billion, accounting for 96% of the total wealth gained by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Among them, this year, Meta CEO Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg)'s wealth increased by as much as $37.1 billion; Avida CEO Huang Renxun's worth soared by $19.6 billion to $62.5 billion; AMD CEO Su Zi Feng (Lisa Su)'s worth rose to $1.2 billion; Supermicro co-founder and CEO Liang Jian (Charles Liang)'s wealth tripled this year to $6.2 billion; benefit from open source AI big model products.

Here are the top 10 fastest-growing U.S. billionaires in AI this year:

Mark, CEO of Meta, Zuckerberg his net worth increased by $37.1 billion and he is now worth $161 billion. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, added $19.6 billion to $62.5 billion. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos added $16.1 billion to $162.6 billion. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (Steve Ballmer), increased by $9.6 billion to $129.5 billion. Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison, added $7.3 billion to $95.3 billion. Dell Dell Technologies, founder and Broadcom equity holder, Michael Dell, up $6 billion to $59.6 billion. Meta co-founder Eduardo Saverin (Eduardo Saverin) added $5.7 billion to $24.6 billion. Larry Page, co-founder of Google and Alphabet, added $4.2 billion to $113.6 billion. Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google and Alphabet, added $4 billion to $106.8 billion. Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz added $3.5 billion to $15 billion.

from the primary market ,CB Insights data show that in 2023, the number of investment and financing for AI start-ups in the United States reached 1151, down from 2022. However, the total amount of financing reached 31 billion billion US dollars, up 14% year-on-year, and attracted nearly half (46%) of all AI transactions in the world, occupying a dominant position, this was followed by Asia (25%) and Europe (24%).

among them, in 2023, the financing scale of generative AI field will account for 48% of all AI fields, occupying a dominant position. Among them, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Inflection and other large model manufacturers are located in the United States, therefore, the U.S. AI field has attracted a lot of capital, technology, talent and core computing power.

just on February 16, according to reports from Bloomberg and the new york Times, OpenAI has recently completed a deal that allows employees to sell shares in the company, led by venture capital firm Thrive Capital, and employees of the company can sell their shares in the company for cash. After the financing is completed,OpenAI's post-investment valuation has exceeded $80 billion (Bloomberg data is $86 billion).

Last April, OpenAI completed its first round of stock sales at a valuation of nearly $30 billion. At the time, Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, a16z and K2 Global agreed to buy shares of OpenAI, valuing the company at about $29 billion. In less than 10 months, OpenAI's valuation has almost tripled.

At present, OpenAI is the third largest technology unicorn in the world after ByteDance (ByteDance) and SpaceX.

In addition to OpenAI, other American AI companies are also making large-scale financing.

according to The information, Scale AI, a US AI company, is financing at a valuation of US $14 billion, about twice the valuation of Scale three years ago. Perplexity AI is financing and selling shares at a valuation of more than US $1 billion. Anthropic companies invested by Google and Amazon have completed a round of financing of US $0.75 billion, with a post-investment valuation of US $15 billion. Investors include Qualcomm, Intuit, Menlo Ventures, etc; abridge is raising funds at a valuation of $0.85 billion, which is more than four times higher than the previous round; Together AI, which is only 20 months old, has completed a new round of financing of more than $0.1 billion, with a valuation of more than $1 billion, double that of four months ago.

at the revenue level, in 2023, OpenAI's annual recurring revenue (ARR) exceeded $2 billion, up 4500 percent year-on-year. AI search company's Perplexity annual revenue also exceeded $10 million, up more than three times from $3 million four months ago.

now, OpenAI CEO altman announced to raise 7 trillion us dollars to reshape the AI infrastructure in the United States. Masayoshi Son, founder of Softbank Group, also reported that he planned to raise 100 billion us dollars to set up an AI chip enterprise.

Wang Xiaochuan, founder of Baichuan Intelligence, has repeatedly said that the OpenAI team is trying to connect 10 million GPUs (graphics processors) together. Compared with the scale of thousands of cards in China, the core resources in China's AI field are far from enough.

"What concept? NVIDIA produces about 1 million GPUs a year, training GPT4 to 25000, GPT3.5 domestic benchmarking 4000, we are doing 4000 benchmarking now, they are studying how to use 10 million GPUs to do this work." Wang Xiaochuan said.

Compared with the US market, China's AI investment and financing sector will be in a "declining" state in 2023.

CB insights report shows that last year, the number of investment and financing in China's AI field was about 232, down 38% year on year. The total amount of financing was about 2 billion US dollars (about 14.245 billion yuan), down 70% year on year. Especially in the first quarter of 2023, both the amount of financing and the amount of financing were the lowest in five years.

The secondary market is also less than expected. AI chip leader Cambrian (688256.SH) recently announced that the company expects to achieve revenue of 0.68 billion yuan to 0.72 billion yuan in 2023. Net profit is expected to lose 0.756 billion yuan to 0.924 billion yuan, narrowing 26.47 to 39.84 percent year on year. In the past 12 months (as of February 17 this year), Cambrian shares have increased by only 39.96 per cent, while shares have fallen by nearly 15 per cent (14.46 per cent) year-to-date.

it's not just the Cambrian. in the past year, China's AI listed company Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) U.S. shares fell 24.41 percent. Baidu Hong Kong stocks (HKG: 9888) fell 26.28 percent. AI leader Shang Tang Group (HKG: 0020) shares fell 65.73 percent, with its market value falling more than 99 billion yuan RMB from its peak. AI leader HKUST Xunfei fell more than 14.5 percent.

iFLYTEKThe recently released 2023 annual performance forecast shows that the company expects to achieve operating income of more than 20 billion yuan in 2023, an increase of about 7% year-on-year; achieve a net profit of 6.45-0.73 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 15%-30%; achieve non-recurring The net profit after profit and loss was 80 million -0.12 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 71%-81%.

On the whole, in the past year, although the domestic AI large model market was "fanatical" on the surface, there was a gap between the US AI market environment and the US AI market environment. If we talk about the reasons, there are not only macro problems, but also gaps in computing power and basic technology.

a person in the industry told titanium media App that there was not enough money and high-performance computing cards to make any mistakes that were inevitable in the innovation process. ps multiples had to be calculated according to the income scale, and the AI gap between China and the United States widened.

as early as 2017, China formulated and issued the "new generation artificial intelligence development plan", which clearly stated that by 2025, China's AI basic theory will achieve a major breakthrough, some technologies and applications will reach the world's leading level, AI will become the main driving force for China's industrial upgrading and economic transformation, and AI will drive the scale of related industries to exceed 5 trillion yuan. by 2030, china's AI theory, technology and application have generally reached the world's leading level and become the world's major AI innovation center. By then, the scale of AI core industry will exceed 1 trillion yuan, driving the scale of related industries to exceed 10 trillion yuan.

"Big models can bring convenience to ordinary people in all aspects, such as helping people learn knowledge, modifying articles, generating solutions, etc. Therefore, the centralized release of big models can make ordinary people quickly contact, use and understand big models." Sun Le, a researcher at the Institute of Software of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and secretary-general of the Chinese Information Society of China, said.

Dai Qionghai, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chairman of the Chinese Society of Artificial Intelligence, said that China is in a leading position in the application of AI and high-speed broadband to improve corporate productivity. By seizing the major opportunities of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, China has continuously improved its top-level design and layout, which is expected to promote the vigorous development of AI technology and industry.

However, as AI technology will become the focus of the next round of "national power" competition between China and the United States, China urgently needs to supplement the development of core areas such as AI chips and computing power to solve related risks and challenges.

Zhao Zhiyun, director of the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Research Center of the Ministry of Science and Technology and director of the China Institute of Science and Technology Information, said that in the future, China needs to strengthen the coordination of resources and research and development forces, accelerate basic research and technological innovation, and actively participate in global AI governance. Promote the orderly development of AI.

(this article starts with titanium media App, author | Lin Zhijia)