Hangzhou’s Four Little Dragons: The Shining “Mysterious Power of the Orient”
Article source: 9,000 light years
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At the end of the Jiachen year, many Hangzhou companies, wearing the aura of “the mysterious power of the East”, were intensively put into the spotlight at home and abroad. For a time, the saying of “Hangzhou Four Little Dragons” spread like wildfire in the Jianghu.
Hangzhou Four Little Dragons
This technological “year-end show” that is closely related to Hangzhou and is a shocking event,It began with a survey conducted by Premier Li Qiang of the State Council in Zhejiang from December 18 to 20.On the evening of December 20,”News Broadcast” recorded a clip of his visit to the West Science and Technology Innovation Corridor of Hangzhou. In less than 3 minutes,Feng Jihe, founder of game science, and “Black Myth: Wukong”、Rokid founder Zhu Mingming and their latest release of Rokid Glasses AI glassesThey all entered the mirror.
One is the first domestically produced 3A masterpiece, which made the suona sound for the first time on the TGA, which is known as the game Oscar. Even if it is regrettable that it missed the best game of the year, it still left behind the reputation of “success is not necessary.” The other is the China representative of XR glasses, which has been repeatedly compared with Meta by overseas media such as Time and Geeky Gadgets.
This monkey and mirror are just warming up.
In the afternoon three days later, Yushu Technology released a dazzling video of the advanced version of the B2 robot dog B2-W. In the video, the four-legged and four-wheeled version easily demonstrates Thomas ‘silk skating combo such as full spin, side somersault, and 360-degree twist jump. It can also leap down from a height of 2.8 meters.This video was quickly forwarded and commented on by Musk.
A few hours later, the global AI community also exploded. Big model startups from ChinaDeepSeek launched and synchronized the open source DeepSeek-V3 model.It also published 53 pages of training and technical details. The large model they trained at less than one-tenth of the cost of their peers leads other large models in the world, including GPT-4o, in many indicators.
Just like seeing B2-W, a large number of foreign netizens whose jaws dropped were shocked asked: “How do China do it?” At home,Some netizens keenly discovered that both companies are from Hangzhou.Therefore, at the end of the Jiachen Year of the Dragon, there were suddenly words like “Hangzhou Four Little Dragons” and “Hangzhou Six Little Dragons” in the Jianghu.
Among them,Yushu Technology, In-depth Exploration and Game ScienceThese three are recognized by all lists. In addition to Rokid, other companies on the list were also representative companies of domestic brain-computer interfaces surveyed by Premier Li Qiang last year.qiangnao technology, who also makes robot dogs and humanoid robots, and has a deep background in Zhejiang UniversityYunshenzhong Technology, and the world’s largest spatial intelligence enterprise with interactive 3D data capabilitiesQunhe TechnologyWait.
Heroes never ask where they came from
Strictly speaking, this is not the first time that Yushu Technology’s robot dog has come out to “blow up the street.” This company, founded in 2016, has won most of the global quadruped robot market, accounting for more than 60% of shipments. Customers include Amazon, Google, Nvidia, Meta, etc.
Founder Wang Xingxing is from Yuyao. He was born in 1990. He has shown a love for machinery and strong hands-on ability since he was a child. When he was 10 years old, he saw robots made in the MIT laboratory. Marc Raibert, who led the project, later became the founder of Boston Dynamics, bringing robot dogs into the public eye.
Wang Xingxing, who was in college, spent 200 yuan to build a simple version of a bipedal robot by hand.
However, Wang Xingxing did not follow the hydraulic control plan made by his predecessors, and focused on motor driving from the beginning.During graduate school, he spent less than 10,000 yuan to make XDog and won the second prize in the entrepreneurial competition.Got the first bucket of gold of 80,000 yuan. Unfortunately, in 2015, no investors were optimistic about this field. In desperation, Wang Xingxing joined DJI.
Fortunately, he easily posted XDog’s video online, and later it was transferred to the Internet, which caused heated discussions, and there were a series of changes. Ten years later, Yushu was described by the media as a “big Xinjiang on the ground.”
Having been dealing with various mechanical parts since he was a child, Wang Xingxing was well aware of the design and cost of each component. Therefore, Yushu’s robotic dog has excellent performance, but its price is significantly lower than that of its peers.
With both the talent of an engineer and the savvy mind of a businessman, Wang Xingxing is not a bully in the traditional sense. He studied at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University as an undergraduate degree. Because of his partial English subjects, he missed the opportunity to enter Zhejiang University to study for graduate school.
But he has absolute confidence in the field of motor-driven robot dogs. When XDog was born, MIT PhDs asked him for his graduation thesis-in 2019, MIT open-source the software and hardware solutions for the Cheetah quadruped robot dog. The important motor part is exactly the same as the XDog three years ago.
When it comes to self-confidence, Feng Ji, who wrote his TGA Game of the Year award speech two years ago, is not too much. He said he was confident when he won, just a repeat of the resultsHe and Game Science have been “doing specific things, doing difficult things, doing things that you believe in… When doing these, of course you should be confident.”
Twenty years ago, Feng Ji, who was still studying biomedical engineering at the School of Life of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, had the opportunity to continue his studies, but he missed his studies when he entered World of Warcraft.He wrote a 6000-word heroic article “Who Murdered Our Game?”, entered the game industry with the passion to change the terrible status quo of domestic online games.
Ten years ago, he founded Game Science, determined to use solid technology to solve specific problems and create a high-quality game with a pragmatic attitude. In 2018, he and his team finally made up their mind to “go westward again” to make up for the regrets left on “Fighting God of War” 10 years ago.”Black Myth: Wukong” officially embarked on the road of learning from the scriptures.
Zhejiang University people who “connect” GPUs
For 2018, China investors are full of painful memories. The Shanghai Composite Index fell 25%, and individual stocks were littered with corpses. But in the ascendant quantitative world, a group called“Magic Square”The company’s cutting-edge company achieved positive returns throughout the year.
The word “magic square” originates from traditional China arithmetic, and the common “Jiugong Grid” is a type of magic square. If you just look at the team composition quantified by the magic square, it is hard to imagine that they are a financial company.
Xu Jin, CEO of the company, graduated from the mixed class of Zhu Kezhen College of Zhejiang University with a bachelor’s degree. He has a doctorate in signal and information processing at the School of Information of Zhejiang University. His research directions are autonomous robot navigation, stereo vision, etc.Liang Wenfeng, the actual controller of the company, is a post-80s generation who graduated from Zhejiang University majoring in software engineering.majoring in software engineering, majoring in artificial intelligence, and began to study quantitative transactions in 2008.
In 2016, Magic Square integrated AI into the trading system, and two years later,”AI was identified as the company’s main development direction.” In 2019, the management scale of magic squares exceeded 10 billion.Become one of the “four giants” of quantitative private placement in China.In the same year, they began to study how to build large-scale GPU clusters.
Since that year, they have purchased a large number of GPUs every year without lack of money. By 2021, magic squares will increase investment in supercomputing cluster systems to 1 billion yuan, and it will be equipped with more than 10000 Nvidia A100 graphics cards. Rumors began to spread in the Jianghu:“The organization with the largest number of high-performance GPUs in China is not an artificial intelligence company, but a magic square.”
In July 2023, Liang Wenfeng founded DeepSeek, focusing on the research and development of AI models. The company is located in Hangzhou.
It is also alumni of Zhejiang University who started a business together,The story of Group Nuclear Technology began with a “slumber talk” between the two founders, Chen Hang and Huang Xiaohuang, at school.At that time, the two “favored children” who were studying at Zhu Kezhen College of Zhejiang University talked about the most about computer computing power and Moore’s Law. After graduation, the two went to the United States to continue studying computer graphics.
From left: Zhu Hao, Huang Xiaohuang and Chen Hang
When he went to the United States, Huang Xiaohuang received a full Nvidia scholarship and his doctoral research direction was GPU high-performance computing. After graduation, he naturally joined Nvidia.Engaged in the construction of programming frameworks for parallel computing on GPU chips and the development of CUDA.At that time, he probably didn’t realize that he was participating in writing a magnificent scientific epic.
After returning to China, the two roommates founded Group Nuclear Technology. The name comes from the GPU architecture they built-Many core processors. Initially, their idea was to put the GPU in the cloud to support rendering and other applications that require high-performance computing. The home design became the best implementation scene. For a long time, its SaaS product “Kujiale” was more famous than Quncore.
Thanks to its long-term accumulation in the field of home decoration in the early stage and in the field of Industry 4.0 in the medium term, the cluster core has accumulated a large amount of data from the physical world. As AI gradually moves from the digital world to the physical world, it sits on a “gold mine”–The data they synthesized is not only of high quality, but also follows physical laws.
On November 20 last year, they disclosed their two major technology engines for the first time:Group core activation (rendering) engine and group core matrix (CAD) engine.One corresponds to a Wanka cluster supported by super computing power, and the other corresponds to a “physical world simulator” composed of massive amounts of data.
The latter has two more words than OpenAI’s definition of Sora’s “world simulator” and places more emphasis on “reality”.
The wind started in 2018
When sorting out the development history of the “Hangzhou Four Little Dragons”, the self-media “Digital Intelligence Frontline” keenly discovered that 2018 is a critical node. That year, Group Nuclear Technology and universities such as Imperial College of Technology, the University of Southern California, and Zhejiang University jointly launched the InteriorNet dataset to provide a data foundation for research on indoor environment understanding, 3D reconstruction, and robot interaction.
At the beginning of that year, Yushu Technology received new financing, and in the second half of the year, pre-sale products began to be shipped, and the company’s flow finally slowly started rolling. Wang Xingxing survived the darkest moment.
At almost the same time,”Black Myth: Wukong” was established. Half a year later, the elite team of Game Science moved to Hangzhou. Feng Ji said that the pace here is not as fast as Shenzhen, and the housing prices are not too high, so everyone can endure it.
In the middle of that year, Rokid held the annual Rokid Jungle. Zhu Mingming, who is used to growing a beard, likes to call himself and his team monkey. He graduated from the Network Multimedia Laboratory of Zhejiang University with a master’s degree and was trying to combine digital technology with reality at that time.
In 2007, he founded “Mammoth Technology” as a mobile operating system, and was acquired by Alibaba three years later.He entered Ali’s helm of Alibaba’s most mysterious department-Studio M,Explore more possibilities for human-computer interaction. Leading this acquisition is Cai Chongxin, who is now at the helm of Ali.
In 2018, the protagonist of Rokid Jungle was still a smart slightly. Rokid Glass AR glasses are just one more thing. A year later, the main and supporting roles shifted, and the smart slightly business finally failed to stop the giants from their crazy price wars.AR glasses have become a lifeline to turn the tide.
Zhu Mingming also returned to the “original point”: in April 2012, he attended the launch conference of Google Glass on site. A few months later, I couldn’t stop asking in my circle of friends if I wanted to invest in finding friends to make something similar to Google Glass, and could I recommend relevant talents.
At the end of 2018, Qiangnao Technology officially settled in the artificial intelligence town of Hangzhou. They acquired a special employee, Ni Mincheng, who had a hand disability. A year ago,He wore a prosthetic limb and used his mind to control it to write calligraphy, completing the first show of Strong Brain Technology in China.
Before his arrival, Qiangnao Technology’s prosthetic data mainly came from the engineers ‘own wear and collection. For a long time, Han Bicheng, the founder of the Harvard University Center for Brain Science, had to use himself to do experiments and apply medical conductive cream to his scalp. At most, he washed his head more than 30 times a day, and more than 800 times a year.
Because her son was always washing his hair when making overseas calls, Han Bicheng’s mother once suspected whether her son was working outside to wash people’s hair.
After returning to China, the brain-computer interface company, one year before Musk’s Neuralink was established, was on the fast lane. More and more people with disabilities and love life were wearing their prosthetic limbs to play the piano and hold up the torch.
A preview of the future
In 2018, known as the “first year of artificial intelligence”, Hangzhou gathered the four little dragons to be regarded as the end of green apple. A year ago, a Google researcher published a paper “Attention Is All You Need”, introducing a new model architecture, Transformer.
Different from previous neural network models, it uses a new “self-attention mechanism” to process language, which allows machines to better relate contexts and understand human language more accurately.
In 2018, Google launched the Bert model based on Transformer to let machines know whether the “apple” mentioned in a paragraph refers to the fruit they eat or Apple. OpenAI, another three-year-old artificial intelligence startup, has launched a series of models called GPT that allow machines to understand and speak smoothly.
But these are all easy and freehand looks in the back. That year, even though its AI computing power business grew significantly, Nvidia was still abandoned by capital.At the end of the year, the stock price was only US$3,It’s almost one-fiftieth of last year’s highest price.
However, they still insisted on giving a series of previews about the future. For example, at CES at the beginning of the year, Huang Renxun demonstrated the results of AI in autonomous driving. Although in March of that year, Uber caused huge controversy when it killed a pedestrian due to a driverless test.
At the end of the year, Nvidia also made aA high-precision, ultra-realistic face AI generation system,Facial images with extremely rich details can be generated as required, and cooperation with MIT to try to generate videos from videos.
These technologies, which seemed like magic at the time, ultimately affected the future development trajectory of all technology companies related to AI, computing, and data, including the Hangzhou Four Little Dragons.
In 2018, the wind of AI also blew all over the country in China. After 2017, artificial intelligence was once again included in the government work report; under the leadership of Li Qiang, then secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee, the first World Artificial Intelligence Conference was held. Last year, at the Davos Forum, Li Qiang specially issued an invitation to the Seventh Conference.
Data map of Xinhua Agency
On October 10 of that year,Huawei has released two AI chips.More than a month later, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industrial Security issued an export control framework for key technologies and related products, which will implement export controls on cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, chips, robots, quantum computing, brain-computer interfaces, and biotechnology.
A technological showdown between China and the United States slowly kicked off.
Why Hangzhou?
In 2018, Hangzhou also opened the door to the future. At that time, Hangzhou officially proposed and mobilized the construction of “China’s No. 1 Digital Economy City”, laying the foundation for the high-level reshaping of the country’s No. 1 Digital Economy and Artificial Intelligence.
On February 14, West Lake University officially received approval,Shi Yigong began the road of “piloting the creation of a new type of private research university”.They recruit top scientific researchers from around the world, not looking at their number of papers, citation rates and other data, but whether they have unique ideas in the field they are deeply involved in.
A year later,They welcomed Lan Zhenzhong, a young man wearing glasses and looking like a scholar who was engaged in artificial intelligence research.He is the first author of the well-known paper “ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-Supervised Learning of Language Representatives”.
Lan Zhenzhong spent a summer vacation designing a solution that could effectively reduce the training parameters of the Bert model and ensure the training effect-much like what DeepSeek did many years later.
If the list of Hangzhou technology dragons continues to expand, his West Lake Xinchen will definitely be among them.
Similarly, when talking about DeepSeek, many industry insiders will naturally mention another open source model from Hangzhou,Owen, a subsidiary of Alibaba Cloud。When it comes to robot dogs, in addition to Yushu Technology, there is also a company with a very poetic name“Deep in the Cloud”。Founder Zhu Qiuguo is from Zhejiang University, and their wheel-footed robot “Lynx” was released earlier than Yushu’s B2-W, which also caused a sensation.
The new AR/AI glasses track is also crowded with elite entrepreneurs from Zhejiang University. Optoelectronics itself is Zhejiang University’s traditional advantageous major. In addition to Rokid, the Hangzhou faces on this list include those invested by ByteDanceLi Weike, relying on technology to cut into the swimming goggles subdivision trackGuangli Technology, from the brain-computer interfaceLooktech, wait.
They bloom everywhere in various districts of Hangzhou such as Yuhang, Binjiang, and West Lake. Under the new wave of technology launched by AI,The entrepreneurial world in this city is far more lively than having one more “Hangzhou Four Little Dragons”.
As for why they appeared in Hangzhou, after Game Science settled in Yichuang Town in West Lake District, a specialist helped this group of young people, who had been turned upside down day and night, fixed the canteen to open a small kitchen for them, and tried to provide good services without disturbing them. As a result, when Black Monkey became famous overnight, he could only apologise to say that “I don’t have much dealings with him in normal times.”
Knowing that Qiangnao Technology was returning to China, the leaders of Yuhang District rushed to Boston, met Han Bicheng in the basement of a pile of debris, and solemnly extended an invitation.
These experiences, which have been summed up in serving technology companies such as Alibaba, Ant Group, Hikvision, and Huawei Hangzhou Research Institute,It has become something in Hangzhou’s genes for creating a high-quality business environment.Coupled with the deeply rooted business genes and active capital, it constitutes a huge attraction to high-end talents.
Hangzhou Panorama Photo by Han Dan
Faced with competition from foreign technology giants, Liang Wenfeng saidChina’s enterprises should be confident, learn to lead technological innovation, and learn to organize and cultivate their own high-density talents.Wang Xingxing said that a high education does not mean everything.”No one is particularly talented. Everyone is actually the same.”
Feng Ji hopes that everyone can continue to be confident and ambitious, remain brave, honest and kind, do every specific little thing down-to-earth, accept the results calmly, and stay on the road to learning from the scriptures until the last moment of life.
These narratives about self-confidence and courage contradict the difficulties of reality. At the end of the Jiachen Year of the Dragon, the “Four Little Dragons of Hangzhou” made many people once again hear the voice of new forces emerging from the ground.