Lei Jun Wang Xiaochuan held hands, and the investment layout of Xiaomi's large model was exposed for the first time

Hengyu originated from the Cave Fei Temple

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In the era of large models, Lei Jun and Wang Xiaochuan came together.

Qubit recently learned that Wang Xiaochuan's startup company Baichuan Intelligence has become a new favorite in the layout of Lei Jun's large model.

In the two rounds of financing progress rumored in Baichuan Market, Lei Jun has reinvested in them and 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.

Lei Jun and Wang Xiaochuan's big model held hands

The specific form of Lei Jun's hand with Wang Xiaochuan is through Xiaomi Group and Shunwei Capital, injecting capital into the large-model start-up Baichuan Intelligence.

The company was pulled up by Sogou founder Wang Xiaochuan in March this year, starting from the basic large model, and has been releasing the model in the form of open and closed source parallelism.

According to the news revealed by the venture capital circle, Lei Jun bet on this company for the first time in May this year.

As Lei Jun's "two hands", Xiaomi and Shunwei participated in the A1 round of Baichuan Intelligent at the same time. The pre-investment valuation was hundreds of millions of dollars, and the amount raised exceeded hundreds of millions of yuan.

In addition to Xiaomi and Shunwei, the A1 round investors of Baichuan Intelligent disclosed by the venture capital platform include Tencent Investment, Tsinghua Holdings, Good Future War Investment, Shenzhen Venture Capital, etc.

The second time is the A3 round of financing carried out by the newly recently Baichuan Intelligence, and the market rumors are that Shunwei and Xiaomi are betting heavily again, with a financing amount of about tens of millions of dollars.

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

However, Baichuan Intelligence is not the only choice for Lei Jun to add a large model startup.

In the previously exposed news, as the investor, Xiaomi Group and Shunwei Capital have thrown a lot of money at the recognized number one player in the market.

Who's home?

Smart Spectrum AI and MiniMax – two of the most sought-after sweet potatoes.

After a few actions, Lei Jun called for the existing layout of the large model:

Replicate Xiaomi's playing style in the mobile Internet era, invest and finance at the same time, and promote internal research and external investment together.

This also shows that Lei Jun attaches great importance to the power of change in large models, and his actions are faster, more accurate and more fierce than the wave of decision-making AI.

Opportunities and challenges of Baichuan Intelligence

As one of the three large-model startups that Lei Jun is betting on outside the market, Baichuan Intelligent is indeed a player in the large-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", and will release a large model equal to GPT-3.5 at the end of the year.

It sounds ambitious, but Hyakawa is confident in it. 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 larger model.

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

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

Now, the Baichuan series of large models behind it has been updated to the Baichuan 2 version, and the latest news is that in late September, the closed-source Baichuan 2-53B with 53 billion parameters was released, and API interface was developed to enter To B.

There is speed, there are products, but the challenges facing Baichuan Intelligent are equally obvious and severe.

On the one hand, the identity of a startup needs to kill blood among a group of rising stars, and it also needs to compete with giants; The parallel advancement of open and closed sources means that the number of competing friends is more.

Such competition can not be described as fierce, and the threshold of money and resources required is not low.

On the other hand, Baichuan's competitiveness and talent attraction have not yet completed the closed loop - this is also where the outside world has been doubtful.

Because so far, Baichuan Intelligence is more like Sogou 2.0 than the expected OpenAI.

The team not only has former Sogou COO Ru Liyun, former Sogou CMO Hong Tao and other executives, but the content of members with Sogou background in the entire team is not low level. According to Wang Xiaochuan's public statement in early August, at that time, Baichuan Intelligent had a scale of 120 people, and members with Sogou backgrounds accounted for 30-40%.

There were even former Sogou employees who laughed that it seemed that it was just that Sogou had changed offices.

Sogou is naturally also a technology company full of geniuses and strong soldiers.

But in China's technology Internet rivers and lakes, whether it is investment or talent, it is inevitable to ask - why can it be different this time?

Especially it is still friends or those friends: Baidu is still that Baidu, 360 is still the 360 under Zhou Hongyi.

And Baichuan Intelligence, now has to take an independent entrepreneurial attitude, on the one hand to compete with first-mover unicorns such as Zhipu Minimax, on the other hand, to fight bayonets with giants such as Baidu, Ali, Tencent, and iFLYTEK 360.

The challenge may be even greater than during Sogou.

One More Thing

Of course, there are changes and there are constants.

What didn't change was that Lao Zhang stood with Xiaochuan again.

The latest development, Zhang Chaoyang's Sohu, has also invested in large models and even the first investment in the field of AI.

The object is no one else, it is Baichuan Intelligence.

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