Here’s to more money for AI startups. Today, Chinese search giant Baidu announced that it plans to establish a venture fund with 1 billion yuan ($145 million) to support startups focused on content created by artificial intelligence applications. .
Reuters, which reported the news earlier, said the company will also launch a competition for developers to build applications from its ERNIE large language model (LLM) or integrate the model into their existing ones. product.
Baidu appears to have stolen a page from the playbook of OpenAI, the San Francisco-based company that has taken the world by storm and which has earmarked $100 million for an OpenAI Startup Fund in 2021 (Per a recent filing, that funding has since grown to $175 million.)
However, the two companies are hardly alone in wanting to fund startups that could become customers or even acquisition targets. Google, for example, is reportedly participating in the latest round of funding for Runway AI, whose software can create images and videos based on just a few words. (According to The Information, Google is investing its balance sheet rather than through a dedicated fund.)
Meanwhile, in China, as in the US, leading companies are racing to dominate a world increasingly filled with generative AI.
A few days ago, for example, the billionaire founder of Baidu Robin Li said that the company will soon launch a new version of a large language model, one that operates its service like of ChatGPT, Ernie Bot, which was first unveiled in March.
Another Chinese tech giant, Alibaba said last month that its own big language model, Tongyi Qianwen, will be integrated into its businesses to improve user experiences.
Tencent is also working on a foundation model, called HunyuanAide.
