Wang Xiaochuan had been marked for greatness from a very young age. The Chengdu native won first prize in China’s National High School Maths Competition aged 14 and a gold medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics at 17. He founded his first company while still a student at China’s prestigious Tsinghua University and became a vice-president of the nation’s second most popular search engine, Sogou, at just 27. It was after stepping down as CEO of Sogou in 2021 that Wang focused his undoubted intelligence on the artificial variety. In April 2023, he founded Baichuan AI, and within six months had already raised $300 million from investors like Alibaba and Tencent, making it one of the fastest companies to achieve unicorn status ever. Wang hasn’t disappointed; in May, Baichuan released its fourth generation large language model, which the company says outperforms competitors in several key metrics. The Beijing-based company—valued at $2.7 billion today—has also unveiled an AI assistant, Baixiaoying, which has the unique ability to ask users follow-up queries to figure out their intentions and better tailor responses. “We’re the only one doing this—to guide and inspire a user to clearly articulate what they need,” Wang told an industry event in May.
