Chuan Wang: With 5 Billion Yuan Raised, I'm in the Top Three

🤖 Mistral launches Large 2 flagship AI model

🌍 AI travel platform Wanderboat

🎨 Stability AI launches Stable Video 4D

🎬 Kuaishou's Keling AI starts charging

🌐 ByteDance launches human-level simultaneous interpretation agent

🏢 Baichuan raises 5 billion yuan in Series A

🌟 Harvey closes $100M round led by Google Ventures

🌍 Exoticca closes €60M Series D

🚀 Blue Origin announces NS-26 crew of six

Mistral launches Large 2 flagship AI model

Mistral has released its next-generation flagship model, Mistral Large 2[1], with 123 billion parameters. The model excels at code generation, math, and reasoning, supports over 80 programming languages and dozens of natural languages, including Chinese.

Large 2 features a 128k context window and scores 84.0% on the MMLU benchmark. Mistral has focused on reducing hallucinations and improving the model's discernment capabilities. The model is available under a "licensed open" arrangement for non-commercial research use, allowing third-party fine-tuning.

Despite having fewer parameters than Llama 3.1, Large 2 approaches the performance of GPT-4, Llama 3.1-405, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Mistral emphasizes that the model will continue to improve on cost efficiency, speed, and performance, with new features like advanced function calling and retrieval to support building high-performance AI applications.

AI travel platform Wanderboat

AI travel platform Wanderboat[2] is reimagining the smart travel experience. Founded by former Microsoft executives You Wu and Xiaochuan Ni, the platform leverages GPT-4 technology to provide 24/7 AI companion services, creating deeply personalized travel planning for users. Wanderboat integrates diverse features like itinerary sharing, calendar sync, and map views, while building a vibrant travel community where users can share experiences and find inspiration.

The platform's innovation lies in its real-time adaptive travel recommendations and high-definition video showcases of attractions, elevating the planning experience. Wanderboat aims to become a comprehensive platform combining the strengths of Xiaohongshu, Dianping, and Mafengtu, setting a new standard for online travel in the AI era.

Wanderboat has raised millions of dollars in seed funding from Sequoia Capital and is currently free to use.

Stability AI launches Stable Video 4D

Stability AI has announced Stable Video 4D (SV4D)[3], which allows users to generate eight dynamic, multi-angle videos from a single uploaded video.

Unlike traditional approaches, SV4D generates multiple new-view videos simultaneously, improving consistency across both spatial and temporal dimensions while simplifying the 4D optimization framework. SV4D generates 5-frame videos from 8 viewing angles in approximately 40 seconds, with the full 4D optimization process taking about 20-25 minutes. The technology has broad applications in game development, video editing, and virtual reality, helping professionals visualize objects from multiple perspectives and enhancing realism and immersion.

SV4D features multi-view video generation, 4D representation optimization, hybrid sampling schemes, and adaptive guidance scaling strategies. Through view-attention and frame-attention modules, it ensures temporal and perspective consistency in generated videos. SV4D uses the latest diffusion model techniques, combined with dataset curation and multiple loss functions, to improve the quality and consistency of generated content. In experiments, SV4D demonstrated strong performance in video frame consistency and multi-view consistency, showing significant advantages in user preference tests, pointing to broad application prospects in AI video generation.

Kuaishou's Keling AI starts charging

Kuaishou has announced full open beta access to its video generation large model Keling AI[4], alongside the launch of a membership system. Keling AI offers three membership tiers — Gold, Platinum, and Diamond — with monthly fees ranging from 66 yuan to 666 yuan, corresponding to different amounts of "inspiration points" for video generation. Users receive free "inspiration points" upon daily login, sufficient to generate approximately 6 videos.

Keling AI has also launched an international version 1.0, allowing foreign users to register with email. Kuaishou executives revealed that the company has achieved significant results using large model technology in advertising, with rapid growth in AIGC ad spend. Analysts consider Keling AI's pricing to be in an "acceptable range," though still in a试探 phase.

Going forward, as user numbers grow, Kuaishou will face challenges such as rising compute costs, with monetization becoming a key focus.

ByteDance launches human-level simultaneous interpretation agent

ByteDance's research team has introduced CLASI, a simultaneous interpretation agent that delivers accurate, natural translations whether handling fast-paced tongue twisters, complex classical Chinese, or casual conversation.

Traditional simultaneous interpretation software typically uses cascaded models — automatic speech recognition followed by machine translation. However, this approach suffers from error propagation that degrades translation quality. ByteDance's CLASI adopts an end-to-end architecture that addresses the flaws of cascaded models. Built on Doubao's speech understanding capabilities, CLASI achieves results comparable to professional human interpreters.

Researchers conducted human evaluations on Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation. CLASI significantly outperformed all commercial systems and open-source SOTA systems in effective information retention, even matching or exceeding human simultaneous interpretation levels in certain tests. CLASI's architecture is based on an LLM agent that autonomously controls the translation process, ensuring efficient information delivery and translation accuracy.

Baichuan raises 5 billion yuan in Series A

Baichuan[5] recently completed a Series A round totaling 5 billion yuan, at a valuation of 20 billion yuan. Investors include tech giants Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi, as well as government-backed industrial investment funds from Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. This marks the first time that government guidance funds from all three cities have jointly invested in an AI large model company.

With Baichuan's addition, the AI unicorn 20-billion-yuan valuation club now has three members. Zhipu AI's valuation exceeded 21 billion yuan after its Series C, while Moonshot AI reached $3 billion after its Series B. Twenty billion yuan has become the entry ticket to large model's first tier.

Founded by former Sogou CEO Chuan Wang in April 2023, Baichuan has released 12 large models. The company pursues a "super model + super app" dual strategy, launching the consumer AI assistant "Baixiaoying" and an AI interactive drama product called "Diejing." On the enterprise side, Baichuan already serves thousands of corporate clients.

The company is particularly focused on healthcare, which it considers "the crown jewel of large models." Baichuan is developing an AI health advisor; its general medical-enhanced large model has surpassed GPT-4 on multiple benchmarks, with official launch expected within this year.

Harvey closes $100M round

Harvey[6], a startup building an AI "Copilot" for lawyers, has raised $100 million in a Series C round led by GV, Google's corporate venture arm, with participation from OpenAI, Kleiner Perkins, and Sequoia Capital. This brings total funding to $206 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. Co-founders Winston Weinberg and Gabriel Pereira said the funds will go toward data collection, training domain-specific AI models, hiring, and service expansion.

Powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 series, Harvey can answer legal questions and automatically extract information from court transcripts. Despite its capabilities, Harvey recommends use under lawyer supervision due to the sensitivity of legal disputes and the potential for language models to generate incorrect information.

Harvey is growing rapidly, with tens of thousands of lawyers at multiple law firms and consulting companies using the tool daily. Though Harvey had originally planned to raise $600 million, the plan fell through and the round was ultimately downsized to $100 million.

Exoticca closes €60M Series D

Spanish online travel platform Exoticca has completed a €60 million Series D round led by Quadrille Capital. The company specializes in multi-day travel packages, simplifying complex itinerary booking by integrating flights, hotels, dining, and other services through its digital platform.

Since 2015, Exoticca has doubled sales annually and now operates across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and other countries. CEO Pere Vallès said Exoticca brings a more flexible, cost-efficient digital model that can save users up to 30%.

This round will fund business expansion, with plans to enter Latin America, the Middle East, India, and China. Exoticca's primary customer base comes from the US and Canada, accounting for 75% of total business. Investors are bullish on the company's financial foundation and execution, with both new and existing investors participating in this round.

Blue Origin announces NS-26 crew of six

Blue Origin is a private aerospace company based in Kent, Washington, founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2000. It recently announced the six-person crew for its NS-26 mission, including Carson Kitchen, who will become the youngest woman ever to cross the Kármán line. This mission is the eighth crewed space tourism flight of the New Shepard program and the program's 26th flight overall.

The crew includes philanthropist Nicolina Elrick, NASA-funded researcher Rob Ferl, entrepreneur Eugene Grin, cardiologist Eiman Jahangir, student Carson Kitchen, and businessman Ephraim Rabin. Ferl will conduct an experiment on plant gene responses in microgravity.

This flight continues to advance Blue Origin's space tourism program. The company has successfully sent 37 people past the Kármán line, the boundary of space. The flight date will be announced soon; Blue Origin's official website has opened a Chinese-language booking page, making space travel accessible to more people.

Life is like an empty pocket, waiting for you to fill it. Whatever you put in, that's what you'll have.

— Feng Jicai

Editorial Team Editor: Ziwen

Design: Ivan

For business partnerships, add on WeChat: Rwkfbcianvd

References [1] Mistral Large 2: https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large-2407/

[2] Wanderboat: https://wanderboat.ai/

[3] Stable Video 4D (SV4D): https://sv4d.github.io/

[4] Keling AI: https://klingai.kuaishou.com/

[5] Baichuan: https://www.baichuan-ai.com/home

[6] Harvey: https://www.harvey.ai/

[7] Exoticca: https://www.exoticca.com/us