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BEIJING, June 20 (TMTPost) -- Under the global frenzy of generative AI (AIGC) sparked by ChatGPT, Chinese tech giants such as Ant Group and Baidu are eager to incubate and invest in the AIGC field.

TMTPost App exclusively learned that Shengshu AI, a Beijing-based company, announced the completion of nearly 100 million yuan in angel round financing on June 19. This round was led by Ant Group, with participation from BV Baidu Ventures initiated by Baidu and Zhuoyuan Capital, and the current valuation has reached $100 million.

The funds from this round will mainly be used to build the core R&D team and accelerate the development of multimodal large models and application products.

This is the first AIGC project invested by Ant Group since ChatGPT was released in November last year, and the third AI content generation-related project invested by BV Baidu Ventures, the first two being Xihu Xincheng and Morph Studio.

It is reported that Shengshu AI was established in March 2023, jointly incubated and founded by the AI company RealAI of Tsinghua University, Ant Group, and BV Baidu Ventures, and is committed to becoming a global leader in generative artificial intelligence infrastructure and application construction. Tang Jiayu, former Vice President of RealAI, serves as CEO. Currently, Shengshu AI is actively building the world's leading controllable multimodal universal large model, and is committed to improving the creativity and productivity of all mankind through generative AI technology.

The research team of Shengshu AI mainly comes from the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Tsinghua University and has long been committed to the basic theory and efficient algorithm research of Bayesian machine learning. Tang Jiayu said that compared to the current models and products on the market, there is still a lot of uncertainty and uncontrollability in the generation results, and there are still many shortcomings in the model's grasp of user intentions and precise control of details. Shengshu AI mainly optimizes the underlying algorithms and does 3D generation effects, multimodal text-to-image, and the first implementation of high-quality 3D content based on three views generated automatically.

The company stated that at present, Shengshu Technology is building vertical applications based on a bottom-up multimodal universal large model for image creation and 3D asset creation. Its AI image generation technology has surpassed the basic model level of Stable Diffusion and is expected to surpass the latest version of Midjourney within the year.

The investor in this round is BV Baidu Ventures, which was established in 2017 by Baidu Group and is an independent venture capital institution. It mainly invests in technological innovation fields with artificial intelligence as the core, covering directions such as AIGC, autonomous driving, new energy, life sciences, enterprise services, semiconductors, and intelligent industry. Currently, BV Baidu Ventures has a total fund size of over $700 million in USD/RMB and has invested in nearly 200 companies.

It is worth noting that since the release of ChatGPT, compared to the situation where USD funds only observe but do not invest and RMB funds are cautious, domestic Internet giants such as Tencent, Baidu, Ant, and Kunlun Wanwei have frequently taken action, not only releasing large models, but also continuously investing in and acquiring AI star companies.

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