China's Baichuan AI raises $300m

The company noted that “many top investment institutions” also took part in the round but stopped short of naming them. It has now raised USD 350m to date, including a USD 50m angel round.

Baichuan was founded as recently as April by Xiaochuan Wang, formerly CEO of search engine Sogou. He assembled a team of AI specialists by recruiting from the likes of Sogou, Google, Tencent, Huawei Technologies, Microsoft, and ByteDance, according to a statement.

The company focuses on generative AI and has developed several large language models (LLMs) in the same vein as Microsoft-supported OpenAI, which created the GPT-4 framework that underpins ChatGPT. Baichuan was one of eight companies – and the only one founded this year – that contributed to China’s interim guidelines for the management of generative AI services.

Four opensource LLMs have been released for free commercial use as well as two closed-source LLMs. The company can complete a new iteration about once a month. The opensource LLMs have achieved more than 6m downloads. Other products include a chatbot service.

Generative AI opportunities tend to fall into three distinct layers: foundational LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-4 at the bottom; sector-specific models for the likes of finance and healthcare in the middle; and a top layer comprising applications that leverage the capabilities of LLMs. Established Chinese start-ups in the space include Luchen, LangBoat, and Emotibot.

The country’s technology giants are also working on their own LLMs. Baidu was the first to make a breakthrough, launching Ernie in March. It subsequently established a CNY 1bn (USD 145m) fund that will invest in generative AI companies, especially those that use the Ernie bot as a foundation.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Technology
• Early-stage
• China
• artificial intelligence
• Alibaba Group
• Tencent
• Xiaomi