Alibaba, Tencent join $300M funding round of Chinese AI startup Baichuan - report
Robert Way
Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) and Tencent (OTCPK:TCEHY) (OTCPK:TCTZF) have joined a $300M funding round for Chinese artificial intelligence, or AI, startup Baichuan Intelligent Technology, Bloomberg News reported.
The investors also include smartphone maker Xiaomi (OTCPK:XIACF) (OTCPK:XIACY), according to the report.
Baichuan is among the prominent startups developing generative AI models in China, hoping to compete with large language models, or LLMs, from the likes of Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI, and others.
In September, the company said it will open-source two LLMs called Baichuan2-7B and Baichuan2-13B, with each model boasting 7 billion parameters and 13 billion parameters, respectively. The scores of the two models are higher than that of Meta Platforms' (META) open-source model Llama 2 in both MMLU and CMMLU evaluation rankings, China Daily had reported.
Baichuan was among the first list of Chinese companies to win approval from China's internet watchdog for AI services to be released for public. The company has since released four open-source LLMs and is working on two proprietary platforms, according to the Bloomberg report.
On Tuesday, Chinese internet search giant Baidu (BIDU) unveiled its latest generative AI model Ernie 4.0, a potential rival to OpenAI's GPT-4 model.
Generative AI services have become the talk of the town since the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT last year. Globally, companies have launched their own LLMs which can provide services such as content and image generation, to name a few.
Alphabet's (GOOG) (GOOGL) unit Google's Bard, Alibaba's (BABA) Tongyi Qianwen and Tongyi Wanxiang, OpenAI's text-to-image AI tool DALLÂ·E 3, Meta's (META) AudioCraft, SeamlessM4T, and Llama 2, and Getty Images' (GETY) model called Generative AI by Getty Images, are some of them.

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