Tencent-backed, $1.42B secretive Chinese AI startup to release first open-weight LLM this month
kimmonismus · x · 2026-09-18
Per The Information, a secretive Chinese AI startup backed by Tencent and valued at $1.42 billion is reportedly preparing to release its first open-weight LLM as early as this month.
Founded in February by Tsinghua professor Jifeng Dai, its approach is unusual: take an existing pretrained model, modify its structure, then improve it via midtraining, posttraining and reinforcement learning. Details remain unverified pending official release.
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