Unique Research · Insight / monthly · August 10, 2023 · Full rewrite of news + financing snapshot — not a stub
Flash stats: Jul 2023 global AIGC financing ¥3.164B / 26 deals (cooler than June heat; vs May ¥3.588B). B+ (incl. strategic) = 80.25% of global amount. Top raise: CloudMinds (达闼). China: ¥1.819B / 15 deals; besides CloudMinds, top domestic late-month raise Hongji Cyclone $40M; China avg deal ¥121M.
01.1 Global news
- Musk’s xAI — understand the universe; talent from Tesla/SpaceX/DeepMind/OpenAI/Google Research; Musk criticizes OpenAI safety posture despite being early supporter; announced amid Twitter stress vs Meta.
- Anthropic Claude 2 — summarize up to 75k words (vs ChatGPT ~3k); knowledge cutoff early 2023 (vs GPT-4 Sep 2021); beats GPT-4 on GRE writing, HumanEval, bar exam; code-interpreter-like; whole-PDF summarize; ~5× cheaper than GPT-4 for developers.
- Google Bard — 40+ languages incl. EU (after privacy delay); TTS; Google Lens image prompts; tone styles; shareable links.
- Microsoft Bing AI → Safari/Chrome; 6 months: >1B chats + 750M AI images; M365 Copilot $30/user/mo for E3/E5/Business; Bing Chat Enterprise free preview for those SKUs, later $5/user/mo standalone.
- DeepMind RT-2 — vision-language-action model; web+robot data → general robot instructions + chain-of-thought (hammer for rocks, energizing drinks, diet fruits); logistics/manufacturing/security.
- Stability AI Stable Doodle — sketch+prompt→image via SD + T2I adapter; ~$1B valuation aiming 4×; vertical apps incl. real estate.
- Meta Llama 2 (7B/13B/70B) free commercial/research; Azure partnership; Qualcomm mobile optimize—“strongest GPT-4 open alternative.” CM3leon text-to-image + captions; plans commercial open models vs MS/Google.
- GitHub Copilot Chat public beta for enterprise via VS/VS Code—context-aware guidance, analysis, troubleshooting.
- Inflection AI supercomputer — 22k NVIDIA H100 (~$40k each), 700 Intel Xeon 4-node racks, 31 MW; Inflection-1 coding gains; raised $1.5B at $4B; NVIDIA possible investor enabling GPU access.
01.2 China news
- Alibaba DAMO PolyLM open multilingual LM (1.7B/13B) + multilingual self-instruct 132.7k instructions.
- Jia Yangqing’s Lepton AI — ML infra; ONNX + etcd founders on team; May angel Fusion Fund + CRV.
- JD Yanxi LM + Yanxi AI compute platform (Aug launch); 70% general + 30% industry data; retail/finance/edu/gov; open custom models H1 2024.
- ChatGLM-6B / ChatGLM2-6B free commercial after enterprise registration (Zhipu + Tsinghua KEG); HF downloads >3M / >1.2M — “Android moment” for open CN LMs.
- Baichuan-13B Base/Chat + INT4/8; trained on 1.4T tokens (+40% vs LLaMA-13B); best commercial open under 33B (per Baichuan).
- 106 CN large models (Economic Observer incomplete); Beijing 54 lead; Shanghai compute edge; SZ/GZ/HZ/CD also; mostly still closed beta.
02 Transactions
Secondary movers and full primary deal tables in CN charts—CloudMinds top globally; Hongji Cyclone $40M notable domestic. Attach images on ingest.
10 CN images; attach on ingest.
— END —