Credit：Visual China

Chinese AI startup Baichuan Intelligent Technology said it has completed A1 strategic funding round of $300 million, backed by tech behemoth like Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi and some of leading venture capital firms in China, such as Shenzhen Capital group and CoStone Capital. In addition to a $50 million of angel, Baichuan accumulated funding of $350 million since it was founded in April 10 by Wang Xiaochuan, founder and former CEO of Chinese search engine Sogou.

The recent funding turned Baichuan into a unicorn in less than half of a year, at the fastest speed to join in the unicorn club for a startup focusing on large language model (LLM) in China. LLM is the AI technology that empowers ChatGPT, the most popular AI chatbot developed by OpenAi since late 2022. With the core team members from talents previously working for Google, Microsoft, Tencent, Baidu, Huawei, Sogou and other established tech firms, Baichuan released one LLM in an average of 28 days in the past six months, out of which there are four open-source LLMs for commercial purpose including. Baichuan-7B/13B and Baichuan2-7B/13B and two closed-source LLMs including Baichuan-53 and Baichuan2-53B.

Baichuan's model is one of the first group of LLMs that obtained regulatory approval for public launch under the Interim Measures to Regulate Generative AI Services, the first of rules on AI-based generative contents and services in China since the launch of ChatGPT. And Baichuan is the only startup among the first LLM developers that are allowed to release to public.

Baichuan’s funding came as Baidu, an LLM pioneer in China, launched Ernie 4.0, Baidu's next-generation and most powerful foundation model, at its annual flagship technology conference Baidu World 2023 on Tuesday. The new Ernie bot powered by Ernie 4.0 is not inferior in any aspect to GPT-4, the latestiteration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Baidu chairman and CEO Robin Li told audience at the event. “Ernie 4.0 has achieved a full upgrade with drastically improved performance in understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory.” Li said. "These four core capabilities form the foundation of AI-native applications and have now unleashed unlimited opportunities for new innovations."

In his keynote, Li demonstrated four core AI capabilities of the new Ernie bot. The bot is able to understand and provide answers to complex and even disorganized human requests, as well as interpreting hidden messages. It can also generate a range of content, including text, images, and videos, in just a few minutes, based on one simple text prompt and image input. Li further showcased the bot can reason by having it solve complex geometry problems. Lastly, the bot’s ability to memorize and integrate incremental inputs was demonstrated by writing a martial arts story and regularly adding new information as was in process of creating the story.

Baidu said it has adopted an AI-native approach to re-build its family of apps, solutions, and products in the past few months. The generative AI-powered Baidu Search can now aggregate and summarize information from diverse web sources and present a consolidated answer through a variety of modals, including text, image and dynamic graph, ensuring answers that are both vivid and concise. It also offers an interactive chat interface for more complex searches, enabling users to iteratively refine their queries until reaching the optimal answer, all in one search interface. As China’s first generative business inellgent solutions, Baidu GBI can quickly execute data inquiries, output business analytics, and deliver results through easy-to-understand text and graph summaries.

Boosted with Ernie’s AI capabilities, the workplace app Infoflow can execute an array of office tasks through natural language processing - from orchestrating meeting agendas and summarizing key takeaways from complicated chat history to preparing meeting briefings based on users' previous meeting documents and even securing flight bookings based on their agenda. With the addition of foundation model capabilities, Baidu Wenku has evolved from a content documenting platform to a content productivity platform.

Baidu Drive YunYiduo, touted as the world's first cloud drive intelligent assistant, allows users to use text prompts or voice prompts to retrieve files, images, videos, and more formats, even for very specific requests. The updated Baidu Maps integrated AI capabilities into its extensive functions including navigation, ride-hailing, restaurant recommendations, hotel booking, and has been developed into the world’s first AI-native map product.

Baidu also rolled out Qianfan, the world’s first one-stop enterprise foundation model platform. The company said Qianfan has now become China's largest, most inclusive foundation model development platform, encompassing 42 existing foundation models, and has empowered enterprises from different sectors to develop their own foundation models and solutions covering more than 500 use scenarios. 

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