BaichuanAI announced on SwitzerlandTuesday that it has raised $300 million in a new round of funding, with investors including Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi. The six-month-old AI startup did not disclose its exact valuation, but declared that it has now become a unicorn, which typically refers to a startup reaching a valuation of over $1 billion. Founded by Sogou CEO Wang Xiaochuan in April, BaichuanAI has launched three AI foundation models with monthly updates since June, and the company claimed the iteration version of its first two models, Baichuan2-7B and Baichuan2-13B, which it upgraded in September, had taken “a commanding lead” in capabilities over Meta’s LlaMA 2. [Caixin, in Chinese]
