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Hong Kong PolyU’s top AI scientist Yang Hongxia eyes ‘last mile of generative AI’

Yang aims to broaden the adoption of LLMs, while expanding AI’s scope of innovation via the most cost-effective means for all enterprises

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Artificial intelligence scientist Yang Hongxia envisions a world in which various businesses could train their own “domain-specific” large language models. Photo: Sina
Zhou Xin
Chinese artificial intelligence scientist Yang Hongxia, a professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), is seeking to democratise large language models (LLMs) by empowering hospitals and various enterprises to train their own AI systems.
Yang, who previously worked on AI models at ByteDance and Alibaba Group Holding’s Damo Academy, said in a recent interview with the South China Morning Post that her newly formed start-up, InfiX.ai, envisioned a world in which various businesses could train their own “domain-specific” LLMs, which would complement commercially available AI models from Big Tech firms and start-up developers. Alibaba owns the Post.
According to InfinX.ai’s landing page on developer platforms GitHub and Hugging Face, the start-up’s research would “eventually lead to decentralised generative AI – a future where everyone can access, contribute to and benefit from AI equally”.
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“Over the next five years, I expect consumers as well as enterprises, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, to have their own domain-specific models,” said Yang, who serves as the university’s associate dean at the Faculty of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, as well as the executive director at the PolyU Academy for AI.

She said InfiX.ai, which had a US$250 million valuation after its initial funding round, had a mission to build “the last mile of generative AI”, making AI applications accessible to everyone.

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That echoed the vision of Thinking Machines Lab, a start-up founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati. This AI research and product unicorn – reportedly in talks for a new funding round that would value the firm at about US$50 billion – said it was focused on “building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools to make AI work for their unique needs and goals”.

Among its various endeavours, InfiX.ai developed methods to create highly capable AI systems that required minimal computational resources, “making advanced AI accessible to organisations of all sizes through techniques like FP8 precision training, edge AI deployment and privacy-preserving solutions”, according to the company.

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