Dai Zonghong, co-founder of Zero One IoT, leaves to start a new business | Exclusive from Intelligence Emergence
Text by | Zhou Xinyu
Edited by | Su Jianxun
Exclusive information obtained by "Intelligent Emergence" reveals that Dai Zonghong, the co-founder and technical vice president of Lingyi Wanwu, recently left the company to start his own business. During his tenure at Lingyi Wanwu, Dai Zonghong was in charge of the AI Infra team, mainly addressing system bottlenecks during large - scale parallel training, improving training efficiency, and reducing training costs.
It is understood that Dai Zonghong's startup project recently received investment from Sinovation Ventures.
In response to the above information, Lingyi Wanwu told "Intelligent Emergence": Co - founder and technical vice president Dai Zonghong started a new business again with the support of Sinovation Ventures several months ago. As of now, Lingyi Wanwu's overall revenue this year has reached hundreds of millions. The company will continuously launch more applications and will also make rapid adjustments to projects based on market PMF, including strengthening investment in some businesses, encouraging projects with commercial potential to conduct independent financing, and also shutting down some projects.
The AI Infra team was once the pride of Lingyi Wanwu. At the beginning of the company's establishment in 2023, Li Kaifu, the founder of Lingyi Wanwu, repeatedly stated externally that people with large - model Infra experience are rarer than those with algorithm skills, and Lingyi Wanwu has a rare AI Infra technology team in the industry.
As the leader of Lingyi Wanwu's AI Infra team, Dai Zonghong is one of the few domestic technical talents with large - model Infra experience. Before joining Lingyi Wanwu, he served as the CTO of Huawei Cloud AI and the head of technological innovation, and the director of AI Infra at Alibaba DAMO Academy. The core members of the AI Infra team he assembled at Lingyi Wanwu come from companies such as Alibaba, Huawei, Microsoft, and SenseTime.
High cost - effectiveness was once the main feature of Lingyi Wanwu in the model industry, which mainly relied on the optimization of training efficiency at the Infra layer. It is understood that Lingyi Wanwu's AI Infra team completed the design, construction, and delivery of a thousand - card GPU cluster and its supporting system within two months.
In an interview, Li Kaifu once said that through the optimization of AI Infra, the training cost of Lingyi's large - model Yi - 34B was reduced by 40%.
The situation took a turn for the worse in the second half of 2024. During this period, Lingyi Wanwu encountered obstacles in exploring AI application business and setbacks in model development.
People familiar with the matter said that Lingyi Wanwu also made mistakes in judging the technical route. This directly led to Lingyi Wanwu not keeping up with the MoE (Mixture of Experts) architecture, which later became the mainstream, until October 16, 2024, when Lingyi Wanwu released its new flagship large - model Yi - Lightning.
By then, high - performance models such as ByteDance's Doubao and DeepSeek's V2 had already occupied the high - cost - effectiveness track. The launch of Yi - Lightning did not gain the expected market attention.
Subsequently, there were team downsizing, spin - offs, and an active withdrawal from the large - model race as a last - ditch effort. As "Intelligent Emergence" reported exclusively, at the end of December 2024, Lingyi Wanwu's model pre - training and AI Infra teams were first laid off and then integrated into Alibaba's Tongyi and Smart Cloud teams.
Dai Zonghong's departure was not surprising after Lingyi Wanwu laid off its AI Infra team. After the team adjustment, Lingyi Wanwu's business focus shifted to the To C AI search application Bigo and To B model solutions. A person familiar with the matter commented to "Intelligent Emergence": "There isn't much business space left for technical talents."
Since the second half of 2024, co - founders and early core members such as Li Xiangang, Huang Wenhao, Pan Xin, and Cao Dapeng have left Lingyi Wanwu. At the beginning of 2025, Lan Yuchuan, an early member of Lingyi Wanwu and the person in charge of the AI video mixing project, also left to start his own business.
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