Naive AI, a stealth startup founded by Tsinghua University professor Dai Jifeng, has completed three funding rounds totaling $400 million, reaching a valuation of over $1.4 billion. The company is preparing to launch its first large language model, also named Naive, as an open-weight release as early as this month.

  • Investors include Tencent, IDG Capital, Matrix Partners China, and Sequoia China.
  • The startup maintains fewer than 100 employees despite its high valuation.
  • Technical strategy involves modifying existing Chinese open-weight models rather than pretraining from scratch.
  • Naive AI is also researching recursive self-improvement technology for automatic model iteration.