Chinese startup Baichuan, specializing in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, has attracted $300 million in funding from a number of well-known companies, including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Tencent Holdings Ltd., and Xiaomi Corp. The company, founded in April this year by Wang Xiaochuan, a former developer of the Sogou search service, became one of the first companies to receive approval from the Chinese authorities for the introduction of a public chatbot. In August, Baichuan launched its chatbot. At the moment, Baichuan is valued at more than $1 billion and has more than 170 employees, including engineers invited from companies such as Google, Huawei and Tencent. The company announced the attraction of investments in its WeChat account. The report notes that she had previously raised another $50 million. Baichuan is one of the leading Chinese startups actively investing in the development and training of AI models. However, this company is not the only one – another Chinese Internet giant Baidu Inc. has introduced a new version of the model of generative (content-creating) artificial intelligence Ernie. The founder of the company, Robin Lee, stated that in terms of content creation, understanding, logic and memory, Ernie version 4.0 is not inferior to the GPT-4 model, which is the basis of the chatbot ChatGPT.
