Baichuan raises $300m in latest funding

Chinese artificial intelligence startup Baichuan Intelligent Technology said on Tuesday that it has raised $300 million from investors including Chinese tech heavyweights Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Tencent Holdings Ltd and Xiaomi Corp.

The latest round of funding followed an early $50 million angel round. Founded by Wang Xiaochuan, founder of internet search engine Sogou Inc, Baichuan was one of the first companies to open its AI large language models to the public after receiving approval from Chinese authorities in late August.

So far, the company has open-sourced four LLMs with 7 billion parameters and 13 billion parameters. These could be put into commercial use for free.

The open-source LLMs will help enterprises simplify the process of model training and deployment, and lower the threshold for the application of LLMs, experts said.

fanfeifei@chinadaily.com.cn