Baichuan launches two AI-powered open-source LLMs

Chinese artificial intelligence startup Baichuan Intelligent Technology unveiled on Wednesday two open-source AI-powered large language models, as the company aims to promote the commercial applications of LLMs.

The company said it will open-source two LLMs called Baichuan2-7B and Baichuan2-13B, with each model boasting 7 billion parameters and 13 billion parameters, respectively. The two models could be put into commercial use for free.

The scores of the two models are higher than that of Llama 2, an open-source model launched by US tech company Meta, in both MMLU and CMMLU, two authoritative LLM evaluation rankings. They have also showcased strong capabilities including mathematics, logical reasoning and semantic understanding.

Baichuan Intelligent Technology was founded by Wang Xiaochuan, former CEO of China's second-largest search engine Sogou Inc in April. It has launched three LLMs, and opened its AI large language models to the public after receiving approval from Chinese authorities last week.

The open-source ecosystem is crucial for promoting the technical advancement and industrial application of LLMs, industry experts said. The open-source LLM will help enterprises simplify the process of model training and deployment, and lower threshold for the application of LLMs, they added.