Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

In the era of big model, Lei Jun and Wang Xiaochuan came together.

Qubit recently learned that Baichuan Intelligence, a start-up company owned by Wang Xiaochuan, has become a new favorite in the layout of Lei Jun's big model.

In Baichuan is still in the market rumored two rounds of financing progress, Lei Jun re-injection, played a key role. But Wang Xiaochuan is not Lei Jun's only big model bet, Lei Jun's horse racing game, there are two star big model unicorns.

The specific form of Lei Jun and Wang Xiaochuan's big model holding hands with Wang Xiaochuan is to inject capital into Baichuan Intelligence, a big model startup, through Xiaomi Group and Shunwei Capital.

The company, led by Wang Xiaochuan, founder of Sogou, started from the basic large model in March this year and has been releasing the model in parallel with open and closed sources. Lei Jun made his first bet on the company in May, according to the venture capital circle.

As Lei Jun's "two hands", Xiaomi and Shunwei participated in the A1 round of Baichuan Intelligence at the same time. The round was valued at hundreds of millions of dollars and raised more than hundreds of millions of yuan.

In addition to Xiaomi, Shunwei, venture capital platform open Baichuan intelligent A1 round investors, there are Tencent Investment, Tsinghua Holdings, good Future War Investment, Deep Venture Capital and so on.

The second is the recent Baichuan Intelligence A3 round of financing, market rumors go smoothly, Xiaomi once again heavy bets, the amount of financing is about tens of millions of dollars.

For the above investment and financing news, Baichuan said that there is no explanation and response.

However, Baichuan Intelligence is not the only option for Lei Jun to add to the big model start-up. Prior to the exposure of the news, as the management, Xiaomi Group and Shunwei Capital have invested a lot of money to the recognized number one player in the market. Whose house is it?

Zhipu AI and MiniMax-- are the two most sought-after cakes.

After several moves, Lei Jun is about to reveal the existing layout of the big model: reengraving Xiaomi's playing style in the mobile Internet era, combining investment and integration, and jointly promoting internal research and external investment.

This also shows that Lei Jun attaches great importance to the transformative power of the big model, and his action is faster, more accurate and fiercer than the decision-making AI wave.

The opportunities and challenges of Baichuan Intelligence as one of the three big model start-ups that Lei Jun bet on on the market, Baichuan Intelligence is indeed a worthy player in the big model start-up market.

First of all, there is the signboard of founder Wang Xiaochuan, and then the team shouted "build the best large model base in China" to release a big model to catch up with GPT-3.5 by the end of the year.

It sounds ambitious, but Baichuan is confident about it. It was established at the end of March and announced at the beginning of April. Two months later, it launched the first open source commercial model, Baichuan-7B, and then maintained the monthly frequency of the larger model.

Many people call it the one with the fastest progress on the big model battlefield in the country. More importantly, not only is the speed fast, but the strength level is also proved by frequent model products:

At the end of August, Baichuan Intelligence was approved to go online and officially open to the public.

Now, the Baichuan series big model behind it has been updated to the Baichuan2 version, and the latest news is that the closed source Baichuan2-53B with 53 billion parameters was released in late September, and the API interface was developed to enter To B.

There are speed and products, but the challenges facing Baichuan Intelligence are equally obvious and severe. On the one hand, the identity of a start-up company not only needs to kill the bleeding road among a large number of new stars, but also needs to compete with the giants, while the parallel promotion of open and closed sources means that there are more competitors in front of the wolf and behind the tiger.

This kind of competition is not fierce, and the threshold of money and resources is not low.

On the other hand, Baichuan's competitiveness and talent attractiveness have not yet completed the closed loop-this is also where the outside world has always had doubts. Because so far, Baichuan Intelligence is more like Sogou 2.0 than the expected OpenAI.

The team not only has senior executives such as former Sogou COO Ru Liyun and former Sogou CMO Hong Tao, but also the membership of Sogou background in the whole team is at a high level. According to Wang Xiaochuan's public statement in early August, there were about 120 intelligent people in Baichuan at that time, with members with Sogou's background accounting for 30-40%.

Even a former Sogou employee laughed that it seemed that (Sogou) had just changed his office.

Sogou is naturally a technology company full of talents and excellent soldiers. But in the successful and defeated Chinese science and technology Internet, whether investment or talent, it is inevitable to ask-why can it be different this time?

In particular, the competitors or those competitors: Baidu is still the same Baidu, 360 is still the 360 under the rule of Zhou Hongyi.

And Baichuan Intelligence, now want to start an independent business posture, on the one hand and Zhipu Minimax and other first unicorn competition, on the other hand, but also with Baidu Aliteng Qunfei 360 and other giants fight bayonets. The challenge may be even greater than in Sogou's time.

One More Thing, of course, changes and stays the same. What remains unchanged is that Lao Zhang and Xiaochuan stand together again.

The latest development, Sohu, headed by Zhang Chaoyang, has also invested in a big model and even the first investment in the AI field. The object is none other than Baichuan Intelligence.

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