Beating AI News Flash: Naive AI, an AI company founded by Tsinghua University Associate Professor Dai Jifeng, has surpassed a valuation of $1.4 billion. Established just months ago, the company is preparing to release its first large language model and will adopt an open-weight model, allowing users to download and modify the model for free.Naive AI recently completed 3 rounds of financing, raising a total of approximately $400 million, with investors including Tencent, IDG Capital, MPCi, and HSG. The company currently has fewer than 100 employees but is developing its own large model and AI Agent.Naive AI did not choose to train the model from scratch but instead continues to optimize based on existing open-source models, enhancing capabilities through mid-training, post-training, and reinforcement learning. Dai Jifeng believes that future competition in large models may not necessarily depend only on who invests more computing power, but can also achieve breakthroughs through model optimization and training methods.Dai Jifeng is a well-known scholar in the field of computer vision, with representative works including Deformable Convolutional Networks and the multimodal foundation model InternVL, and his papers have been cited over 50,000 times in total. He previously served as a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, later became Executive Research Director at SenseTime, and returned to teach at Tsinghua in 2022. In 2025, he joined MiroMind, an AI company incubated by Chen Tianqiao's Shanda Group, as a co-founder.After leaving in January this year, Dai Jifeng failed to reach an agreement with MiroMind over intellectual property usage rights and the departure of key personnel, and in April, both sides publicly accused each other through The Washington Post and internal notices, with MiroMind claiming "breach of business integrity" and reserving the right to pursue legal action.Currently, Naive AI remains in a low-profile stage, with no specific models, parameters, or test results announced on its official website.
