Industry Report | 2023 Global AIGC Industry Annual Report

Unique Research · Industry annual report · February 29, 2024

Full-year 2023 view of global AIGC: traffic rankings, primary-market financing, and China secondary-market color. ~30 CN charts are image-primary — attach on ingest. This EN package keeps methodology, Unique viewpoints, headline ¥/$ facts, and named cases from CN prose; it does not invent table rows from chart images.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Unique viewpoints (capital, tech, competition/policy, ethics, scale forecasts, applications)
3. Global AIGC website traffic
4. Global AIGC primary market
5. China AIGC secondary market
6. Report statement / data notes

1. Introduction

2023 saw dense research output in AI and generative computing (AIGC), and primary markets leaned harder into AI. Unique Research analyzed global AI traffic, rankings, and categories — highlighting strength in image generation/editing and intelligent search — and covered financing across primary and secondary markets. The report is both a year-in-review and a forward look for operators and investors.

2. Unique viewpoints

2.1 Capital heat

H1 2023 alone saw global AIGC financing of about ¥106.656B. Milestones included OpenAI’s B+ round and Databricks’ acquisition of MosaicML. Capital was not limited to the U.S. and China — Microsoft, Google, NVIDIA, Tencent and peers also participated.

2.2 Tech × industry

Advances in NLP, computer vision, and foundation models lowered creation barriers and lifted productivity across content, personalized recommendation, and dialogue systems — with visible impact in games, film/TV, education, and healthcare, spanning text, image, video, and audio.

2.3 Competition & policy

The U.S. and China remain the heaviest R&D/application spenders; Europe, broader Asia, and Canada also compete. Government support — funding, compute infrastructure, guidance — has been material to industry build-out.

2.4 Society & ethics

AIGC remakes content ecosystems and jobs while raising originality, copyright, privacy, and misuse risks. Societies need guardrails as capability scales.

2.5 Scale forecasts

Unique Research cites external-style projections that AIGC could contribute on the order of ~$7.9T of global economic upside via productivity, cost, and new models. For China, industry scale is projected near ¥720.2B by 2028 and toward ¥1T+ by 2030.

2.6 Application breadth

From auto-generated articles/music/art/video, to personalized learning tools, assisted diagnosis and drug R&D, personalized ads and e-commerce copy, and 24/7 chat support — AIGC is already a cross-industry change agent.

3. Global AIGC website traffic

3.1 Global AI TOP50

ChatGPT remained #1 and took 54% of monthly traffic in the TOP50. On Jan 11, 2024 OpenAI launched a custom GPT store; since custom GPTs opened on Nov 6, 2023, users had created >3M custom assistants. Reporting at the time put OpenAI in talks for a round at ~$100B valuation.

Similarweb-style Q4 reads showed many AIGC sites cooling after novelty wore off — products had to prove lasting value. ChatGPT still led: 1.43B visits in December vs 1.73B in November. DeepL held roughly steady at 213M December visits; Character.AI and Notion AI were relatively stable across Oct–Dec. Of TOP50, 13 sites grew in Q4; text-to-video Pika surged +364%, nearing ~5M visits by late December.

3.2 Category mix (TOP50)

Image editing (6), image generation (5), and intelligent search (5) led category counts. Eleven of the TOP50 were image gen/edit related — far ahead of other buckets — while 16 categories had only a single site, suggesting users already have preferred tools for many narrow jobs.

3.3 Growth leaders

In early December Meta shipped free Imagine with Meta AI (Emu-based), logging nearly 3M visits that month. A Russian TTS site jumped from ~41k visits in November to nearly 700k in December (~1M registered users, 400+ voices).

3.4 China domestic TOP50

Baidu Ernie Bot approached 15M December visits; Baidu said users reached 100M, with cumulative 3.7B characters of text, 300M lines of code, 400M characters of professional contracts, 5M travel plans, and 2.4M instances of advice/support. iFLYTEK Spark V3.5 (Jan 30, 2024) was positioned as near GPT-4 Turbo overall, with claimed edges in math/language/voice and ~96% / ~91% of GPT-4 Turbo / GPT-4V on code and multimodal internal scores.

3.5 China categories & outbound TOP25

Domestic boards favored image generation, chatbots, and writing tools, with model train/deploy, design, and office tools also present. Outbound AI Top20 was dominated by image gen→edit and video gen/edit (~24% each in the cited mix).

4. Global AIGC primary market

Headline: 2023 global AIGC financing ¥190.2B across 282 rounds; B+ and later (incl. strategic) were 93.2% of financing scale. OpenAI raised ¥70.58B in-year (~37% of global), with Tiger, Sequoia, Microsoft and others. China: ¥19.18B / 168 rounds (vs 215 prior year). Top China raise: Baichuan Intelligence at ¥2.49B (~13% of domestic), with Alibaba, Tencent Investment, Xiaomi among backers.

• 4.1 China deal count −21.9% (168 vs 215) but monthly activity climbed — from 1 deal in January to 21 in June (Kunlun↔Qidian, Meituan↔Lightyear, Tencent→MiniMax among large June items) and a November peak of 32 (01.AI, Shenyan, Jirui, etc.).
• 4.2 Overseas deal count −58.4% (114 vs 274); quiet early months, recovery into H2.
• 4.3 China amount +16.4% to ¥19.178B (from ¥16.473B); January soft (¥1.35B vs ¥23.32B YoY), June spike to ¥5.248B (~4× YoY).
• 4.4 Overseas amount ~¥171.03B (+256% vs ¥47.99B); April alone ~¥70.586B driven by OpenAI’s ~$10.3B round (Tiger, Sequoia, a16z, etc.). Star-project “siphon” effect clear.
• 4.5 China stages: seed 6→12; Pre-A 24→15; A 26→25; acquisitions 1→5.
• 4.6 Overseas stages: seed 74→45; A 66→16; later rounds quiet; M&A still active.
• 4.7 China check sizes: early-stage total (through A) ¥57.44B→¥46.87B (−18.4%); strategic investment ¥28.48B→¥83.93B; acquisitions ¥0.97B→¥32.08B. Seed/angel average checks rose (cited ¥128M / ¥802M averages in CN — treat as CN-stated averages).
• 4.8 Overseas concentration: through-A amount ¥83.12B vs ¥133.68B (−37.8%) but higher average checks; strategic ¥52.88B→¥603.34B; acquisitions ¥14.30B→¥160.53B.
• 4.9 Country mix: U.S. #1 at ¥163.851B; China #2 at ¥19.178B; France rose to #3; Israel #4; Singapore/Japan/Korea rose in rank even where absolute dollars fell; 16+ countries that invested in 2022 did not continue in 2023.

Named cases (prose)

China Top cumulative: top 20 firms ~¥16.79B (87.5% of domestic). Leaders: Baichuan ¥2.49B; Biren ¥2.0B; MiniMax ¥1.93B; Lightyear Beyond ¥1.68B; Shenyan ¥1.4B; also CloudMinds ¥1.0B, 01.AI ¥0.71B, NineData/九章云极 ¥0.38B. Several China names ranked in global AIGC financing Top20 (Baichuan #8, Biren #10, MiniMax #11, Lightyear #12, Shenyan #14, Qidian #15/#16-class, CloudMinds #17-class per CN ranking list).

Overseas Top: OpenAI ~¥71.93B cumulative on the board; Anthropic ~¥49.5B; MosaicML and Casetext among acquired names (Databricks / Thomson Reuters); Germany’s Aleph Alpha ~¥3.55B B round; France’s Mistral AI ~¥2.94B strategic (a16z lead; NVIDIA GPU Ventures, Salesforce Ventures).

5. China secondary market

East Money: AIGC concept index closed 2023 at 1,568.50, +73.51%, with ¥7.92T turnover and 659.52% turnover rate; 105 of 133 names rose in market cap. Top gainers cited: Hongbo Shares +325.73%; Wondershare +228.93%; Zhongke Information +178.62%; ChineseAll +177.86%; Kunlun Tech +169.06%.

2023 AIGC-board newcomers named in CN include Parallel Tech (并行科技, BJ839493, Nov 1 BSE listing — HPC/intelligent-compute cloud), Huaxin Yongdao, Weston, Haikan, Deerma, Santai, Kangliyuan, Yidao Information — company blurbs in CN are longer for Parallel Tech / Huaxin; other names are list-level in this package (full bios image/CN-appendix; attach on ingest).

6. Report statement / data notes

Team: Unique Research is Unique Capital’s research center on new business innovation — new marketing/retail/experience, plus AI×traditional industries.

Data: Financing analysis sourced from Xiniu Data. Seed combined with angel where sparse. Lead investors estimated at 50% of round size; non-leads at average share. Percentages forced to 100% with residual on last bucket (~1% rounding). FX: pre-2023 amounts at Dec 31, 2022 rates; 2023 monthly amounts at deal-day rates. Report is market reference only; Unique Research disclaims legal liability for data/views under method and source limits.

30 CN images (charts/boards); attach on ingest — do not invent table rows from images.

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