The "winter money" for the large model "Six Little Tigers" is gradually being received.

"Intelligent Emergence" exclusively learned that China's large-scale model unicorn Step Star has recently completed Series B financing, with a total financing amount of hundreds of millions of dollars. This financing involves state-owned assets, strategic and financial investors, etc. The core investors include Shanghai State-owned Capital Investment Co., Ltd. and its funds. Strategic and financial investors include Tencent Investment, Wuyuan Capital, Qiming Venture Capital, etc.

It is understood that this financing will be used to continue to invest in basic model research and development, strengthen multi-modal and complex reasoning capabilities, and increase coverage of C-end application scenarios through products and ecology to provide a rich user experience.

Among the "Six Little Tigers (Wisdom Spectrum, Step Star, MiniMax, Dark Side of the Moon, Zero One Thing, Baichuan Intelligence)", Step Star's most distinctive label is: solid technology.

“Crossing the river by feeling the stones of OpenAI” is the development path chosen by many large domestic model companies. Jiang Daxin, CEO of Step Star, once told "Intelligent Emergence" that just like from ChatGPT to Sora, "single modality - multi-modality - the unity of multi-modal understanding and generation - world model - AGI (general artificial intelligence)" is the step Xingchen has planned a development path since the first day of its establishment.

However, as technical capabilities and resource levels have reached a bottleneck, many domestic manufacturers have suspended or given up on the exploration of AGI.

Step Star is one of the few model-level companies that follows the AGI exploration route and maintains efficient technology iteration and output.

According to statistics, in the past 10 months, Step Star has released a total of 11 self-developed base models. The modes include language (hundred billion parameters and trillion parameters), image understanding, and video understanding. , image generation, video generation, speech reproduction and generation, speech recognition.

While maintaining high-frequency model output, Step Stars still ensures the model's capabilities.

In the LiveBench evaluation list released on November 19, 2024, Step-2, a large-scale trillion-parameter language model independently developed by Stepstar, ranked first among domestic large-scale base models, second only to On OpenAI o1 and Claude; on November 22, the latest LMSYS Chatbot Arena list released showed that the Step Star multi-modal understanding large model Step-1V ranked first among China's large models in the visual field.

Solid technical capabilities have also accumulated reputation for the commercialization of Step series models. "Smart Emergence" learned that in the second half of 2024, the number of calls to the Step Star multi-modal API increased by more than 45 times.

Among them, the Step series models have accumulated a number of active application developers. For example, AI applications such as "Lyric Changer", "Book of Stomach", and "Forest Healing Room" that are popular on social networks all use the multi-modal model of Step Stars.

Developer of "Book of Stomach"Zhao Chunxiang once said that the product went through "A/B testing" when selecting models, and finally found that the product had the highest payment rate after being connected to Step Star's multi-modal model.

The key factor for technology to be “competitive” lies in the talent density of Step Star. "The large model is not a human sea tactic," Jiang Daxin told "Intelligent Emergence". "The height of the few people at the top of the pyramid determines the height of the entire model."

As a researcher at Microsoft Asia Internet Engineering Research Institute (STCA) As the vice president and chief scientist of the university, Jiang Daxin is a scholar with great talent appeal.

In the construction of the large model team, Jiang Daxin has his own judgment on the core elements: "system, algorithm and data."

A core member of Step Star is Zeng Zhu Yibo, the director of ByteDance, is also one of the few AI system experts in China who has extensive experience in large-scale cluster and system construction. The company’s core members in terms of data and algorithms include Jiao Binxing, who came from Microsoft STCA, and Zhang Xiangyang, an AI scientist who is one of the authors of ResNet.

The mature team configuration has allowed Step Star to avoid many detours in model training. A typical case is: the 100 billion parameter model Step-1 started training on July 1, 2023, and completed the training at the end of August, and it was a rare one-time success.

Today, extending from the model layer to the application layer is a business strategy for large model manufacturers to expand the scale of revenue generation, collect data and user feedback. The product strategy adopted by Step Star is "self-research + ecological cooperation".

In terms of the layout of self-developed products, Step Star has launched the intelligent assistant "Yue Wen". The multi-modal intelligent visual search function "Photo Ask" based on the self-developed visual understanding model is the first large-scale product function in China integrated into the iPhone 16 camera control keys.

In the early days of large-scale model implementation, cooperating with customers in downstream industries to find PMF is a more efficient way to "target the nail" and understand market demand. In professional fields such as finance and economics, content creation and intelligent terminals, Step Star chooses to cooperate in depth with leading companies in various fields to create.

For example, it co-founded the large-model technology company "Caiyue Star" with Shanghai Finance Association, a subsidiary of Shanghai Media Industry, and launched the financial industry vertical large-scale model Finstep and the C-side personal wealth assistant "Xiaoyue Star" "God of Wealth"; in the field of smart terminals, it has become a large-scale technical partner of leading mobile phone manufacturers such as Honor and OPPO.

The current large model investment market environment is highly competitive. An investor who continues to follow up on large-scale model financing said that being able to finalize a new round of financing at this time and win the favor of many well-known and professional investment institutions with different attributes shows that the capital market is optimistic about the technology of the step star base model. Leadership, product differentiation and commercialization potential, and a balanced shareholder structure will also give Leap more room for development in the future.

Within a week, Zhipu and Stepping Stars successively finalized new rounds of financing, and the competition among the top six entered the finals.