Baichuan-Inc, an AI venture set up by the founder of search engine Sogou Wang Xiaochuan, unveiled a large language model called baichuan-7B with 7 billion parameters on Thursday. The launch comes two months after the establishment of the new AI startup, and an employee from the company told TechNode that they had begun training the model at Sogou. Chinese tech giant Tencent took Sogou, the country’s number three search engine, private in an acquisition deal in September 2021. Seen by Wang as Baichuan’s first milestone, baichuan-7B is open-source. The company claims the model has achieved “excellent results” on the three most influential Chinese language assessment benchmarks. [Baichuan-Inc, in Chinese]