China-based artificial intelligence startup Baichuan announced that it has received 5 million yuan, approximately 691 million dollars, from Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi.
China-based artificial intelligence startup Baichuan announced that it has received 5 million yuan, or about $691 million, in investments from Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi.
The company is now valued at 20 billion yuan ($2.7 billion), Bloomberg reported. Baichuan also received additional investments from the Beijing government’s AI Industry Investment Fund, Shanghai AI Industry Investment Fund and Shenzhen Capital Group.
Baichuan was founded by Wang Xiaochuan in April 2023. The company has become a leading AI developer in China with its work on generative AI and big language models in competition with Microsoft and OpenAI. Baichuan’s core team includes many AI experts from major tech companies such as Google, Tencent, Baidu, Huawei, Microsoft and ByteDance.
Baichuan was one of the first companies to receive regulatory approval to launch large language models in China, starting commercially with the launch of Baiuchan2-53B. Since launch, it has released more than 7 LLMs, including Baichuan-13B, Baichuan4B and Baichuan12, and introduced its AI assistant Baixiaoying in May 2024.
At its launch in May, the company said its eponymous LLM, Baichuan 4, outperformed the most popular LLMs at the time, including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic PBC’s Claude 3 Opus, in the latest SuperCLUE test of AI model Chinese proficiency. The company also said its Baixiaoying chatbot stood out for its ability to search like a pro against local competitors such as Baidu’s Ernie bot and Moonshot AI’s Kimi.
