Article reprint source: Model Evolution
Original source: Quantum Bit
Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI
In the era of big models, Lei Jun and Wang Xiaochuan came together.
Quantum位 has recently learned that Wang Xiaochuan’s startup company Baichuan Intelligence has become Lei Jun’s new favorite in his big model layout.
In the two rounds of financing that Baichuan Shang was rumored to have made, Lei Jun invested heavily in them and played a key role.
But Wang Xiaochuan is not Lei Jun’s only big model bet. There are two other star big model unicorns in Lei Jun’s horse racing game.
Lei Jun and Wang Xiaochuan hold hands with a large model
The specific form of Lei Jun's cooperation with Wang Xiaochuan was to invest in the large-scale model startup company Baichuan Intelligence through Xiaomi Group and Shunwei Capital.
The company was founded by Sogou founder Wang Xiaochuan in March this year. Starting with a basic large model, it has been releasing the model to the outside world in a parallel form of open and closed source.
According to information revealed by the venture capital circle, Lei Jun first bet on this company in May this year.
As Lei Jun's "two hands", Xiaomi and Shunwei invested in Baichuan Intelligent's A1 round at the same time. The pre-investment valuation of this round was hundreds of millions of dollars, and the financing amount exceeded hundreds of millions of RMB.
In addition to Xiaomi and Shunwei, the venture capital platform has disclosed that the investors in Baichuan Intelligence's A1 round include Tencent Investment, Tsinghua Holdings, TAL Investment, Shenzhen Capital Group, etc.
The second time was the recent A3 round of financing conducted by Baichuan Intelligent. Market rumors said that Shunwei and Xiaomi once again made heavy bets, with the financing amount being approximately tens of millions of dollars.
Regarding the above investment and financing news, Baichuan said it has no explanation or response yet.
However, Baichuan Intelligence is not Lei Jun's only choice for investing in large-scale model start-ups.
According to previously disclosed news, as investors, Xiaomi Group and Shunwei Capital have invested a lot of money in the market's recognized number one player.
Whose house is this?
Zhipu AI and MiniMax - two of the most popular products.
After several moves, Lei Jun's current layout of the big model is about to emerge:
Replicate Xiaomi's strategy in the mobile Internet era, combining investment and financing, and promoting internal research and external investment together.
This also shows that Lei Jun attaches great importance to the transformative power of big models, and his actions are faster, more accurate and more powerful than during the wave of decision-making AI.
Opportunities and challenges of Baichuan Intelligent
As one of the three large-model startups that Lei Jun is rumored to have bet on, Baichuan Intelligence is indeed a well-known player in the large-model startup market.
First of all, there is the signature figure of founder Wang Xiaochuan, and then the team declared to "build the best big model base in China" and to release a big model that is on par with GPT-3.5 by the end of the year.
It sounds ambitious, but Baichuan is confident in this. It was established at the end of March, officially announced in early April, and launched the first open-source commercial large model Baichuan-7B two months later, and then maintained a monthly frequency of larger models.
Many people call it the company with the fastest progress in the domestic large-scale model battlefield. More importantly, not only is it fast, but its strength is also proven by the frequent release of model products:
At the end of August, Baichuan Intelligence was approved to go online and officially opened to the public.
Nowadays, the Baichuan series of large models behind it have been updated to the Baichuan2 version. The latest news is that the closed-source Baichuan2-53B with 53 billion parameters was released in late September, and an API interface was developed to enter the To B market.
It has speed and products, but the challenges facing Baichuan Intelligence are equally obvious and severe.
On the one hand, as a startup, it needs to fight its way through a group of rising stars, and also compete with giants; while the simultaneous advancement of open and closed source means that there will be more competitors, with wolves in front and tigers behind.
Such competition is extremely fierce, and the money and resources required are not low.
On the other hand, Baichuan’s competitiveness and talent attraction have not yet completed a closed loop - this is also where the outside world has always had doubts.
Because so far, Baichuan Intelligence is more like Sogou 2.0 compared to the expected OpenAI.
The team not only includes former Sogou COO Ru Liyun and former Sogou CMO Hong Tao, but also has a high percentage of Sogou-related members. According to Wang Xiaochuan's public statement in early August, at that time, Baichuan Intelligence had about 120 people, and 30-40% of them had Sogou-related backgrounds.
Some former Sogou employees even joked that it seemed like (Sogou) had just moved to a new office.
Sogou is naturally a technology company with many talented people and strong teams.
But in the world of Chinese technology and Internet, where success is determined by success and failure is the rule, one cannot help but ask, whether it is investment or talent - why should it be different this time?
In particular, the competitors are still the same competitors: Baidu is still the same Baidu, and 360 is still the 360 under Zhou Hongyi.
Baichuan Intelligence now has to start its own business as an independent company, competing with leading unicorns such as Zhipu and Minimax on the one hand, and fighting with giants such as Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, iFlytek, and 360 on the other.
The challenges may be even greater than during the Sogou period.
One More Thing
Of course, there are changes, but there are also constants.
What remains unchanged is that Lao Zhang and Xiaochuan are standing together again.
The latest development is that Sohu, headed by Zhang Chaoyang, has also made its first investment in big models and even in the field of AI.
The target is none other than Baichuan Intelligence.