Chinese start-up Baichuan debuts AI assistant powered by upgraded LLM, eyes AI super app

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Baichuan said the fourth iteration of its namesake Baichuan 4 model, unveiled on Wednesday in Beijing, is the most advanced large language model (LLM) launched by a Chinese company.

The Beijing-based firm’s self-developed Baichuan 4 LLM is currently ranked the highest on SuperCLUE, a benchmark test that specialises in evaluating Chinese LLMs, the company said.

The latest SuperCLUE ranking placed Baichuan 4 higher than GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3 Opus, the latest LLMs from Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Amazon-backed Anthropic, respectively, when it comes to measuring an AI model’s Chinese language capabilities.

GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3 Opus were launched in November and March respectively, representing the most sophisticated LLMs from the two US heavyweights among global AI start-ups.

Also unveiled at the Baichuan event was the company’s debut AI assistant service called Baixiaoying, which the company envisions will grow into an AI super app, according to Wang Xiaochuan, company founder and chief executive.

“The path to artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be driven by both a powerful LLM and a super app,” Wang said.

Baichuan, Wang’s new venture after the 45-year-old veteran entrepreneur sold his search engine firm Sogou to Tencent Holdings, is leveraging the founding team’s expertise in the online search arena to rev up competition in the Chinese AI chatbot arena.

Baixiaoying, “an AI assistant who knows how to search”, stands apart from local peers such as Baidu’s Ernie bot and Moonshot AI’s popular Kimi, due to its ability to “search like a professional” while “guiding and inspiring users to ask accurate questions”, according to Wang.

In one demonstration on Wednesday, Baichuan showcased how its Baixiaoying chatbot was able to deal with a query on how to open a jammed car bonnet with a follow-up question about the car model before giving a response, while two other local chatbots were only able to respond generally.

The prowess of chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Baidu’s Ernie have drawn an influx of users to trial such services, although how to frame the question so an AI model can properly understand and respond accordingly remains a hurdle for many users. This has led to the concept of prompt engineering, which requires users to invest significant amounts of time to learn how to give instructions to a chatbot.

The Baichuan bot, with the ability to follow up user queries to figure out their intentions, is expected to lower the barrier for chatbot use by local users.

“We’re the only one doing this – to guide and inspire a user to clearly articulate what they need [as responses from chatbots],” Wang said.

Wang also dismissed the recent price war among local AI firms – initiated by ByteDance and followed by Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the Post, then Baidu and AI specialist iFlyTek.

“Low price is not enough to be considered a competitive edge in the market”, Wang said.

On Wednesday, iFlyTek significantly reduced the price of some versions of its Spark LLM, while making other versions free.