On June 26th, according to a quantum bit report, AI big model company Stepstar is conducting a new round of financing with a valuation of $2 billion, and Alibaba is also among the investors.
An industry insider close to Jieyue Xingchen told Interface News reporters that Alibaba is indeed in contact with Jieyue Xingchen, but the two sides are still in the negotiation stage and have not yet determined the investment matters.
According to this, Interface News reporters have sought confirmation from Step Star, but as of the time of publication, there has been no response.
Jieyue Xingchen is an AI modeling company headquartered in Shanghai, founded by Jiang Daxin in 2023. Jiang is one of the leading figures in the field of AI technology in China.
Before starting his business, Jiang Daxin was the global vice president of Microsoft and the chief scientist of Microsoft Asia Internet Engineering Research Institute (STCA). He led the natural language understanding system of Microsoft's leading products, such as Bing, the Microsoft search engine, Cortana, Microsoft Cloud Azure, and Microsoft 365.
Stepping Star aims at AGI as its technical goal and adopts the technology implementation path of "unimodal multimodal multimodal unified understanding and generation world model AGI".
The large model products currently released by this company include Step-1 trillion parameter language model, Step-1V trillion parameter multimodal model, and Step-2 trillion parameter MoE (mixed expert architecture) language preview version. At the application layer, Jieyue Xingchen has released Yuewen, a personal efficiency assistant, and Bubble Duck, which provides leisure and entertainment to intelligent agents.
After the OpenAI GPT series brought big models to the forefront, domestic entrepreneurs have raised resources in just two years and quickly formed a leading camp of startups in the field of big models. In the industry consensus, a unicorn club dominated by six companies has emerged - Moon's Dark Side, Minimax, Zhipu AI, Baichuan Intelligence, Zero One All Things, and Step Star.
But until now, Jieyue Xingchen has never actively disclosed its financing process and valuation scale, and its style of action is extremely low-key. This financing rumor reveals for the first time the approximate valuation of Step Star in the market, and also demonstrates Alibaba's role and attitude in the field of big models more clearly.
In fact, in the field of AI big models, in addition to building the universal big model of Tongyi Qianwen and its derivative AI applications, Alibaba has also made significant investments as an investor in the unicorn camp - it has previously invested in 5 of the aforementioned 6 companies, except for Step Star.
Alibaba is currently involved in investing in the Angel Wheel of Everything, the A-round of Baichuan Intelligence, and the B4 round of Zhipu AI. As a leading investment institution, Alibaba has completed investments in the Dark Side of the Moon and Minimax in the first half of this year, with post investment valuations exceeding $2.3 billion and $2.5 billion respectively.
If Alibaba finally decides to invest in Step Star, the Internet giant will completely cover the head of the industry, the start-up unicorn. To a large extent, this represents that this giant will have a higher say in the industry chain, commercialization, and industry resources in the field of large models in the future.