IDG, Hubble, and Yuanhe jointly invested in Qiu Xipeng, a well-known professor at Fudan University.

A professor's startup has once again received support from top VCs.

According to CVSource of China Venture Capital Association, Shanghai Moss Intelligence Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Moss Intelligence") has completed its first - round financing. The investors include IDG Capital, Huawei Hubble, Yuanhe Holdings, and Xinglian Capital, an institution affiliated with the intelligent spectrum.

Moss Intelligence was founded by Qiu Xipeng, a well - known professor at Fudan University, and his students. Qiu Xipeng is one of the most well - known professors in the domestic AI field. His monograph "Neural Networks and Deep Learning" is a "must - read for beginners in artificial intelligence" in China. In 2023, he led his team to release the large model MOSS, which became the earliest open - source Chinese large language model to gain wide popularity.

Moss Intelligence is mainly engaged in the research and development of large speech models and recently released MOSS - Speech. According to the official statement, this marks that domestic AI has entered a new stage of "true speech - to - speech interaction".

01. Who is Qiu Xipeng? A Fudan professor and a preacher of artificial intelligence

In November 2024, Moss Intelligence was established in Shanghai. This young company is committed to promoting the industrialization of multi - modal interaction and embodied intelligence, hoping to reshape the combination of speech and vision through a more "human - understanding" AI interaction system.

The core technical direction of Moss Intelligence is to build a natural and anthropomorphic interaction experience by deeply understanding the context and situation provided by users. The company's current main business focuses on the application field of large speech models, and its products are mainly used in speech - intensive scenarios such as game commentary, live - streaming e - commerce, and news broadcasting.

What enabled Moss Intelligence to attract investments from top institutions such as IDG Capital, Huawei Hubble, and Yuanhe Holdings at the angel - round stage is inseparable from Qiu Xipeng, the founder of the company and a professor at the School of Computer Science of Fudan University.

Qiu Xipeng was admitted to Fudan University in 1997 and obtained a bachelor's and a doctor's degree in science successively. He has been teaching at Fudan University since 2007. Currently, he is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Computer Science of Fudan University and an important promoter in the field of natural language processing (NLP) in China.

Interestingly, Qiu Xipeng's original undergraduate major was not computer science. Before entering Fudan University, he had hardly been exposed to programming. It was in the general education courses at Fudan that he was first exposed to computer science and was deeply attracted by it, and finally switched to this field.

According to the official website of Fudan University, Qiu Xipeng's main research directions include natural language processing and deep learning. He has published more than 50 papers in top international conferences and journals such as ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, and IJCAI, and is a highly recognized scholar in the domestic and international academic circles. The open - source natural language processing tools FudanNLP and FastNLP he developed are still widely used today.

In 2015, Qiu Xipeng was selected for the first - ever "China Association for Science and Technology Youth Talent Support Program"; in 2018, he won the "Qian Weichang Science and Technology Award for Chinese Information Processing - Hanwang Youth Innovation Award" of the Chinese Information Processing Society of China.

In 2015, Fudan University offered the "Neural Networks and Deep Learning" course for the first time. Since there was no suitable textbook at that time, Qiu Xipeng decided to write the lecture notes himself. Later, these notes were expanded into the monograph "Neural Networks and Deep Learning", which has become a classic in the field of AI education in China and is known as a "must - read for beginners in artificial intelligence". Qiu Xipeng has thus become a preaching figure in the field of artificial intelligence in China.

However, what really made Qiu Xipeng well - known outside the academic circle was that during the Spring Festival in 2023, he led his team to quickly launch the open - source Chinese large language model MOSS. This model, named after the quantum supercomputer in the science - fiction movie "The Wandering Earth 2", hit the top of the Weibo hot search list as soon as it was released.

At that time, OpenAI had just released ChatGPT, and there was still a gap in domestic large models. The achievement of Qiu Xipeng's team was the first open - style Chinese dialogue large model in China, which not only filled the technical gap in the Chinese context but also promoted the open - source research ecosystem of domestic large models.

The Chinese name "Mosi" of the newly founded Moss Intelligence is exactly the transliteration of "MOSS". It can be seen that this company is a transformation project of the previous scientific research achievements.

02. The newly released MOSS - Speech makes robots speak more naturally

According to the industrial and commercial information, Qiu Xipeng currently serves as the chief scientist of Moss Intelligence and is also the largest shareholder, holding about 29% of the shares.

Image source: CVSource of China Venture Capital Association

Li Shimin, the co - founder and CEO of the company, is a student of Qiu Xipeng and a postgraduate - doctoral continuous student in the School of Computing and Intelligence Innovation of Fudan University, class of 2022.

This young man with the same name as the emperor of the Tang Dynasty has already made a name for himself in the academic circle. According to a report on the official WeChat account of Fudan University in June this year, Li Shimin, as the first author, has published 3 papers in CCF - A international conferences and has been deeply involved in the key research and development project of the Ministry of Science and Technology's "New Generation Artificial Intelligence 2030", making important breakthroughs in the field of anthropomorphic human - machine interaction.

Before starting his business, he led the launch of SpeechGPT, the first domestic discrete end - to - end speech interaction model. This model broke the traditional three - level cascaded architecture of "speech recognition → dialogue model → speech synthesis" and realized the direct interaction mode of "speech input → speech output", which is regarded as the early prototype of the "speech - version GPT".

In 2024, Li Shimin also led his team to develop the interdisciplinary collaboration platform "Xueqiao". This product "Xueqiao" integrates more than 100,000 official papers provided by the school's information office and library, as well as information on thousands of teachers and student experts, breaking the information barrier for interdisciplinary cooperation.

When being interviewed by the official WeChat account of Fudan University, he said, "Our goal is to truly transform cutting - edge technologies into products with social value." It can be seen that Li Shimin is Qiu Xipeng's outstanding student, continuing his tutor's academic exploration and application - oriented technology orientation both in scientific research and product development.

Currently, Moss Intelligence is building a multi - modal large model and an intelligent agent content creation platform benchmarking Google Gemini Pro around its core technology, covering high - performance audio - video understanding and generation capabilities. The latest progress shows that under the leadership of Qiu Xipeng and Li Shimin, Moss Intelligence recently released MOSS - Speech.

According to the official introduction, this model marks that speech AI has officially entered the "speech - to - speech" interaction stage. Different from the traditional cascaded scheme of "speech recognition - text generation - speech synthesis", MOSS - Speech realizes direct speech understanding to speech generation without the need for text mediation. This model can capture non - text signals such as intonation, emotion, and laughter while generating answers, making the machine "speak" more naturally and humanely.

In 2023, when being interviewed by Fudan University, Qiu Xipeng said, "In the long run, we hope to use MOSS as a foundation for general artificial intelligence and make it a real existence like a character in a science - fiction movie. I think the arrival of general artificial intelligence from science - fiction to reality won't be far away, maybe in 5 to 10 years."

From scientific research to entrepreneurship, Qiu Xipeng and his students are using the power of business to bring the "future" closer to reality bit by bit.

References:

1. CIPS Large Model and Generation, True Speech - to - Speech Interaction: MOSS - Speech Officially Released

2. Fudan University, Research Results Will Be Open - Sourced! In - Depth Interview with the Fudan MOSS Team

3. Fudan University, May 4th Youth Medal! He Chose... Instead of a "Big Company"

This article is from the WeChat official account "Beyond the J Curve", author: Yang Boyu, published by 36Kr with permission.