Beating AI News Flash: ModelBest, founded by Fudan University professor Qiu Xipeng, has announced the completion of over $1 billion in Pre-A round funding, led by Huakong Fund, with participation from CDB Venture Capital, Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Fund, and others. The company was established at the end of 2024, with Li Shimin, a student of Qiu Xipeng, serving as CEO. The funds from this round will be used for research and development of full-modal real-time interaction technology and global commercialization.ModelBest aims to enable AI to understand human emotions and the surrounding environment while listening to people speak. For example, when someone says "a bit cold" in a car, the AI needs to combine the in-car temperature, the speaker, and past preferences to determine whether to adjust the air conditioning. It also needs to know when to respond and when to remain silent.On the technical side, the team has open-sourced models such as MOSS-Audio and MOSS-VL-Realtime. The former can analyze emotions in sound, identify different speakers, and recognize environmental sounds. The latter can continuously watch video, answer questions while watching, and revise its answers based on changes in the visuals.Currently, ModelBest is integrating voice, vision, memory, and tool-calling capabilities into the MOSS Live real-time interaction system, targeting scenarios such as smart cockpits and AI hardware. The company says it has already begun deliveries to some enterprise clients, with the long-term goal of creating an AI assistant similar to the one in the film "Her," enabling AI to continuously understand the user's environment.