(Yicai Global) March 20 -- Kai-Fu Lee, chairman and chief executive of renowned Chinese venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures, intends to set up a new artificial intelligence company called Project AI 2.0 to leapfrog the accumulated innovation that formed ChatGPT in the United States.

Capital and computing power are getting gradually aligned for Project AI 2.0 and that includes global recruitment of top-notch talents in areas such as large language models, multimodal natural language processing, AI engineering and research, as well as distributed computing, and infrastructure, the chairman of the robot and software investment company said in his WeChat moments yesterday.

Lee has over four decades of experience in AI. The CEO has a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and he used to be president of Google China after senior executive roles at Apple and Microsoft.

Several technical managers who have experience in leading large teams at global companies have confirmed their intention to join the new venture, the Beijing-based VC firm said to Yicai Global. Lee will first lead the team and later find another chief executive to take the helm.

Project AI 2.0 doesn't just aim to become a Chinese equivalent of American OpenAI's ChatGPT, a chatbot that generates texts and visual content, per the firm. Discussions about some very cool overseas products are prevalent online but they are only primary applications, per Lee. "The opportunities will be much bigger in the future, and it will be a platform-level trend."

In a recent industry forum, Lee said that the focus of future AI will be AI 2.0, a must-see revolution. After major breakthroughs in deep learning, the emerging industry is entering a new era as AI can now better simulate human intelligence due to the fast development of datasets and model training methods. AI 2.0 will bring forth platform-style changes and drive the development and commercial applications of next-generation models, he added.

Founded in 2009, Sinovation Ventures has invested in several Chinese AI companies, including Qingdao-based AInnovation Technology Group and Lanzhou Technology.

Editors: Zhang Yushuo, Emmi Laine, Xiao Yi