Baichuan

Baichuan (百川智能) was founded in April 2023 by Wang Xiaochuan, the man behind the Sogou search engine. The company shipped models quickly — the open Baichuan-7B and -13B became popular building blocks in the Chinese ecosystem — and was immediately counted among the "AI tigers."

Where rivals chased ever-larger general models, Baichuan later took a narrower path and focused on healthcare and medical AI, with the stated ambition of building "an AI doctor." The turn illustrates how crowded the top tier of Chinese LLM development has become: differentiation rather than yet another generalist.