Sougou’s former Chief Marketing Officer Hong Tao has announced that he will soon be joining Baichuan-Inc, an AI company co-founded by Sougou’s former CEO Wang Xiaochuan and former COO Ru Liyun. In his new role, Hong will be responsible for the commercialization of the company’s large language models (LLM). In June and July of this year, Baichuan-Inc officially launched two open-source LLMs, Baichuan-7B with 7 billion parameters and Baichuan-13B with 13 billion parameters. In September 2021, Chinese tech giant Tencent took over Sogou, the country’s number three search engine, in an acquisition deal. In April 2023, Sougou’s former CEO announced the establishment of Baichuan-Inc with a $50 million starting fund. [CLS, in Chinese]