Today AI, founded by Qi Junyuan, former head of Doubao PC, has raised over $200 million in cumulative funding: Tencent, Ant Group, and Sequoia Capital have joined in, and the company has begun training its own models.

Beating AI News Flash: Today AI, founded by Qi Junyuan, founder of Teambition and former head of Doubao PC, has announced cumulative funding of over $200 million. Investors include IDG Capital, Tencent, 5Y Capital, Ant Group, Sequoia China, Transsion Holdings, Tongge Venture Capital, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University Hanyuan Assets.

Today originally planned to build software first, then develop hardware, and finally train its own models. Now the R&D sequence has been adjusted to advance software and models in parallel, and an early experimental model version already exists. The reason is that existing large models are becoming increasingly capable at programming, but their ability to communicate naturally with users and understand personal preferences has not improved in tandem. Today hopes to specifically train a model suited for personal assistants, while hardware is planned to be developed jointly with partners.

However, the product still falls short of the personal AI assistant envisioned by the team. In a previous interview with LatePost, the Today team admitted that the system's ability to proactively understand and adapt to users currently scores only "20 to 30 points out of 100." Geek Park's ten-day trial also found that Today could complete the localization of a game mod in 15 minutes, yet because it repeatedly gave incorrect installation suggestions, it kept the reporter struggling back and forth for an hour. How to judge the priority of tasks and when to act proactively remain issues that such personal agents need to solve.