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China’s 4 new ‘AI tigers’ – Baichuan, Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI and MiniMax – emerge as investor favourites

  • Baichuan has joined a club of domestic unicorns focusing on generative artificial intelligence that include Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI and MiniMax
  • Known as the ‘four new AI tigers of China’, the start-ups have raised money from domestic tech giants, venture capitalists and state-backed investors

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Baichuan’s founder Wang Xiaochuan. Photo: Weibo/量子位
Ben Jiangin Beijing

A group of artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups are emerging as China’s best hopes for reaching the frontier of ChatGPT-like technology, as they draw increasing attention from users and investors.

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Among them, Baichuan is the latest to complete a new round of fundraising. While the start-up told the Post on Thursday that there had been some “discrepancies” in local reporting about the amount raised, several outlets estimated Baichuan’s latest valuation to be at about US$1.8 billion.

That puts the Beijing-based company in a league of domestic AI unicorns – start-ups valued at more than US$1 billion – that also include Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI and MiniMax.

The group has been dubbed locally as the “four new AI tigers of China”, in contrast to the four “old” AI dragons – SenseTime, Megvii, CloudWalk Technology and Yitu Technology – which focused mostly on facial and image recognition technologies.

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Chinese AI-generated cartoon series broadcast on state television

Chinese AI-generated cartoon series broadcast on state television

Since Microsoft-backed start-up OpenAI debuted ChatGPT in late 2022, Chinese Big Tech firms and start-ups alike have been racing to draw users to their generative AI services, which are capable of creating content, such as text, images, videos and audio.

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About 200 large language models (LLMs) – the technology underpinning generative AI services – have been launched in China so far, according to government figures.

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