Ex-ByteDance Intern’s $200 Million AI Lab Takes On Fei-Fei Li

A former ByteDance Ltd. intern has secured funding from venture heavyweights including 5Y Capital for a stealth startup to take on AI pioneers such as Fei-Fei Li in the nascent realm of world models.

Tian Keyu’s research lab doesn’t yet have a name or a product, but it’s raised close to $30 million from investors including Moonshot-backer 5Y and IDG Capital, valuing his company at $200 million after the investment. Tian completed his master’s degree last summer at Peking University and has spent the past year tackling a field championed by Li and Yann LeCun: AI models that simulate real-world physics and mechanics to power applications ranging from robotics to interactive video and autonomous driving.

The bet at such an embryonic stage illustrates a growing trend among investors toward identifying and investing in promising developers. Li’s World Labs was acquired by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. in a multibillion-dollar deal last month, which AMD Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su said was for “access to world-class talent.” The developer behind Jev, a new, cheaper alternative to large language models, has also attracted investor interest at a valuation of more than $10 billion, according to the Financial Times.

Tian was the lead author of a paper honored as one of the best at NeurIPS 2024, a premier AI research conference, proposing a more efficient image-generation approach that operates like a large language model by predicting upcoming pixel clusters.

The funding and the paper follow Tian’s stint at ByteDance, which dismissed him in 2024 after three years. ByteDance said in on online statement at the time that it had terminated a former intern for “a serious violation.” It gave no further details, but said Chinese social media rumors accusing Tian of sabotaging foundation model training were misleading.

Tian said in an interview that he shut down another intern’s program to free up computing resources for fellow researchers. He acknowledged wrongdoing while characterizing his actions as a vigilante act. In a civil suit filed by ByteDance, a court ordered Tian to pay 500,000 yuan ($75,000) for breaching his contract, forfeiting his entire salary, according to a ruling viewed by Bloomberg.

“It was me fighting fire with fire,” Tian said. “If I could go back with what I know today, I would definitely take a wiser approach.”

A ByteDance spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment on Tian’s dismissal. Representatives for 5Y and IDG confirmed their investment in his startup, without offering further comment.

With his new venture, Tian seeks to leverage his award-winning paper to create a new tokenized language for AI to process visual media, information he says human words cannot efficiently capture. At his 10-person startup, which includes other former ByteDance workers, Tian said they have built something akin to a dictionary for AI – with 200,000 symbols unrecognizable to humans – to help systems process video.

“You can’t ever perfectly describe a video using human language,” Tian said. “We are first creating a language for AI and then feeding it 100 million hours of video.”

Using this technique would compress the cost of generating a second of video by at least an order of magnitude, Tian said. He plans to showcase these capabilities at live events ahead of a full model release in 2027. The priority is to deliver the technology and he said he’s not spending time on a consumer product or developing a business model.

Tian’s timetable comes as a global race in world models gathers momentum. LeCun, the former chief AI scientist at Meta Platforms Inc., raised $1 billion in seed funding for his Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs startup. In China, companies such as video generator PixVerse and 3D AI developer Vast are already working on interactive world models similar to Google DeepMind’s Genie 3, which allows users to navigate virtual 3D environments in real time.