It is reported that MiniMax is carrying out a new round of large-scale financing, with Ali leading the investment.

According to Cailian News, the domestic big model competition continues. The science and technology innovation board Journal reporter learned exclusively from people familiar with the matter that MiniMax, a start-up project of general large model, is carrying out a new round of large-scale financing.Ali is the core lead investor.

Not long ago, the dark side of another big model startup, Moon, also reported the completion of financing of $1 billion, and Ali also appeared among investors.

The science and technology innovation board Journal reporter also learned exclusively that,In this round of large-scale financing on the dark side of the moon, most of the funds came from Ali.This also made Ali a major shareholder outside the dark side team of the month after this round of financing. What is more noteworthy is that,Part of Ali’s investment belongs to calculation payment.

It can be seen that Ali’s investment strategy for domestic large models is becoming more radical after the beginning of the year, and both the frequency and the amount of money are obviously rising. Prior to this, Ali had invested in Baichuan Intelligence, Zhipu AI and 10,000 things. At this point, Ali has completed investment coverage for the first few large domestic models.

Ali’s investment in domestic big models, in addition to holding shares and other considerations, is a more critical strategic point, or laying a first-Mover advantage for Alibaba Cloud’s competition in the AGI era. The strength competition of domestic large-scale entrepreneurial projects is becoming more and more fierce, and the competition and layout of internet giants in this field has also begun to get out of the differentiation situation.

Domestic big models burn money continuously.

The above-mentioned insiders said that the latest round of financing of MiniMax is still in progress, and the final amount has not yet been fully determined."But it will also be a big financing like the dark side of the moon."

The science and technology innovation board Journal reporter learned that most of the two large-scale financing of domestic large-scale models recently came from Ali’s contribution. As for the capital contribution logic of Internet giants including Ali, some investors have analyzed that in addition to holding these domestic large-scale model projects, it is also related to the future development considerations of cloud services of the big manufacturers themselves.

"The more the big model is trained to the back, the greater the capital investment is needed. Different from Internet applications, applications based on big models have to pay reasoning expenses in the use process, so they naturally rely on cloud vendors. Just like the overseas big model war situation, OpenAI binds Microsoft, while Anthropic binds AWS and Google. Internet and cloud service giants are facing this prospect, and their willingness to save money is also strong. "

At present, domestic large models are catching up with GPT 4. According to relevant data, GPT 4 needs to be carried out on a single computing cluster with tens of thousands of A100 parallel computers, and the training takes 4-6 months. In the case of limited supply of computing chips, most domestic large-scale model entrepreneurial projects cannot have the same training conditions, which is also the biggest bottleneck of domestic large-scale models at present. However, domestic head cloud service vendors have rich clusters of computing power. From this perspective, the development of large-scale model startups may be constrained by big Internet companies.

It has been reported in the market that after the supply of computing chips was limited last year, the price of cloud services of big Internet companies increased, and the contract prices of some large model startups and cloud service vendors directly increased by 50%. Yang Zhilin, the founder of the dark side of the moon, also mentioned in a recent interview with the media that the price of the machine changed every day for a period of time. "The price has always changed, and the strategy has always changed. There are many different choices from which channel to buy or rent."

From this perspective,Although two large-scale entrepreneurial projects have received a large amount of financing, the biggest winner in the two transactions may also be Ali as an investor."Regardless of the proportion of computing power payment in Ali’s investment in domestic large models, Ali has realized the long-term binding of the project’s demand for computing power clusters and Alibaba Cloud through investment." The above investors told reporters.

It further stated that for the project side, the binding with the Internet giant is a double-edged sword. That is to say, on the one hand, this deep binding may become a constraint to its own development. "On the other hand, the project has very good training resources at once through this binding, and it is possible to launch a better big model than other domestic startups in a short time."

In a recent interview, Yang Zhilin was also asked questions related to Internet giants. Regarding the view that the big model company is finally acquired by the giants, it said in the answer, "Not necessarily, but they may have a deep cooperative relationship. OpenAI and Microsoft are typical cooperation models, and there are many things that can be referenced and some that can be optimized. "

According to the transaction details disclosed by foreign media, a large part of Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI is also paid by force. Other terms include that Microsoft will get three-quarters of OpenAI’s profits until it recovers up to $10 billion in investment; Microsoft’s shareholding in OpenAI is 49%.

Regarding the above investment trends and details, the science and technology innovation board Journal reporter contacted Ali, MiniMax and the Dark Side of the Moon, but no reply was received as of press time.

The competition for domestic big models is fierce

In 2024, Ali’s investment strategy for domestic large models became radical. Some analysts told the science and technology innovation board Journal reporter that,"Wu Yongming is buying a long-term future for Alibaba Cloud through investment."Wu Yongming is the current CEO of Ali Group, Taotian Group and Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Group.

The industry expects that the development of the big model in the future will bring great changes to the field of cloud services. At present, the Internet giants, who are aware of the impending change, have started the competition in cloud services. Overseas giants such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon not only bind AI customers through equity investment, but also actively cooperate with big model startups to broaden the imagination of future cloud business.

Microsoft is undoubtedly the earliest one among them, and it is also the first giant to reap the fruits. Satyanarayana nadella, CEO of Microsoft, previously said in a conference call that more than 18,000 companies are using Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service, including customers who have never used Azure before. At the same time, many of the revenue growth of its cloud computing product Azure comes from the GPT 4 portal provided by Microsoft.

The above-mentioned analysts told reporters that before, Ali and Tencent’s investment in domestic large models belonged to "spreading water", but at present they are out of differentiation in investment strategy."Tencent has always been hesitant. On the one hand, it may be because the decision-making level has not fully understood the big model and has expectations for its own mixed model. On the contrary, its foreign investment action has slowed down. After the beginning of the year, Ali obviously became more fierce. "

Last year, Ali and Tencent appeared in the same round of financing of Baichuan Intelligent and Zhipu AI. In addition, Tencent launched MiniMax’s A round of financing last year; Alibaba Cloud has invested exclusively in the Angel Wheel.

From the decision-making level, Ali put forward the strategy of "AI+ platformization" two-wheel drive last year; As for Tencent, at the recent Tencent 2023 annual meeting, Ma Huateng said that in the AI field, "We can finally keep up with the first array, which is not the most advanced, but at least it is not too backward. I think we should combine our scenes later and apply the AI ? ? mixed model to various scenes. In a short period of one or two years, I feel that there will not be a pure native AI application, and it should still be integrated into all our products to improve efficiency. I think this is a great opportunity. " Tencent’s own mixed model was unveiled in September last year.

Among the domestic big manufacturers, Baidu, which publicly stated that cloud services have been boosted by big models, was the first to enter the market and lay out big models. The 2023 financial report released by Baidu recently showed that its non-online marketing revenue was 8.3 billion yuan, up 9% year-on-year, which was the highest quarterly revenue in the history of this sector, mainly due to the expansion of its business in intelligent cloud. At the earnings conference call, Li Yanhong said that "the big model brought about 660 million yuan in revenue to the cloud business".

People familiar with the field of cloud services said: "In the future, cloud vendors without the support of the top-level big model may have a difficult competitive advantage."

At the current stage, the advent of Sora model is also stimulating Internet giants to start a new round of AI investment strategy adjustment. Some insiders told the science and technology innovation board Journal reporter that "Byte and Tencent are now looking at the direction of Wensheng video."

Original title: exclusive | domestic big model competition is fierce! After the dark side of the moon, Ali has to invest in MiniMax’s large amount of financing

Editor: Deng Xi Editor: Zhang Songtao Audit: Feng Fei