Chinese AI Startup Baichuan Receives $300 Million Investment

Chinese artificial intelligence startup Baichuan Intelligent Technology announced that it has raised $300 million from investors, including Chinese technology giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Tencent Holdings Ltd and Xiaomi Corp. Baichuan, founded by Wang Xiaochuan, founder of internet search engine Sogou Inc, was one of the first companies to take its AI broad language models public after receiving approval from Chinese authorities in late August. So far, the company has four open-source LLMs containing 7 billion parameters and 13 billion parameters. These can also be made commercially available for free.

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Chinese AI Startup Baichuan

According to a source familiar with the matter. Shunwei Capital, a venture capital firm chaired by Xiaomi's CEO Lei Jun, participated in the capital increase. Baichuan declined to comment. On Tuesday, Baidu (9888.HK) also unveiled Ernie 4.0, the newest version of its generative AI model, saying its capabilities are on par with OpenAI's pioneering GPT-4 model. However, analysts warned that the launch lacks highlights compared to the previous version.

Baichuan Intelligence was founded on 10 April 2023 by former Sogou CEO Wang Xiaochuan. The company's mission is to help the public easily and universally obtain worldwide information and professional services, and is committed to building China's top large model base through breakthroughs in artificial intelligence language. The company's core team consists of top AI talents from well-known technology companies such as Sogou, Baidu, Huawei, Microsoft, Byte and Tencent. The company has released two major open source Chinese models, Baichuan-7B and Baichuan-13B, which are free for commercial use, 100 days after its establishment.