Tian Keyu, first author of NeurIPS 2024's best paper, has reportedly jumped into the world model startup scene. According to sources, the project was incubated and funded by Meng Xing, a partner at Wuyuan Capital, and has raised tens of millions of dollars at a valuation around $200 million.
Business records show Tian has registered several AI companies in Beijing this year. He holds a 60% stake in Beijing Lan Tan Network Technology, which focuses on AI hardware, smart robotics, and AI R&D. Another company, Beijing Lan Zhi Tan Network Technology, has a registered capital of $1.9 million.
Tian previously interned at ByteDance. The company accused him of tampering with code and attacking team model training tasks, filing a lawsuit in 2024 demanding 8.02 million yuan (about $1.1 million). The case has been accepted by the court, but no public ruling has been found.
After the lawsuit, Tian — as first author — won the NeurIPS 2024 Best Paper award for VAR, an image generation framework. VAR uses a coarse-to-fine "next-scale prediction" approach, and the paper claims it surpasses diffusion Transformers in image quality, inference speed, and data efficiency.