Exclusive丨After Meituan acquired Lightyear, the first-class technology team refused to merge, Yuan Jinhui started a new business

An insider told Leifeng.com that after Light Years Beyond was merged into Meituan, some teams were merged into Meituan to conduct large model research, while some technical teams operated independently, and the structure still belonged to Light Years Beyond.

Shortly after Meituan acquired Lightyear, Yuan Jinhui announced on WeChat that the OneFlow team had recently re-started a business, saying that it would launch a large model inference and deployment system to solve the pain point of high costs in the industry. However, he did not disclose whether a new company would be established. company.

Sources said that Yuan Jinhui and most of the first-class technology team have recently chosen not to merge into Meituan and start a new business. However, a handful of top tech employees have joined Meituan.

First-Class Technology was founded in 2017 and subsequently launched the heterogeneous distributed deep learning framework OneFlow, the MLOps full life cycle management platform OneBrain, and the large-scale model training open source toolbox Libai (Li Bai), etc., which basically focus on the AI ​​training stage. An industry insider analyzed that with the open source of LLaMA2, First-class wants to make a base product similar to LLaMA2. However, with the open source of LLaMA2, its iteration speed will definitely be faster than that of First-class, and the value of First-class will be reduced a lot.

Judging from the above analysis, this may also be one of the factors that accelerated Yuan Jinhui's re-entry into business.

There is no doubt about the technical capabilities of the first-class team in AI Infra, and there is no need to worry about talent density. The high cost of training large models has always been a pain point for many teams, especially entrepreneurial teams. This time, Yuan Jinhui leads most of the original team to start a new business and may provide relevant teams with some solutions worth looking forward to.

The author of this article, Dai Congfei, pays attention to Bytedance, Tencent, Alibaba, Kuaishou, Meituan and other companies. He has also recently paid attention to the field of large models. Readers are welcome to add WeChat Congc_a to communicate.