Wang Xiaochuan

Wang Xiaochuan (born 1978) is a Chinese computer scientist and entrepreneur, a Tsinghua University prodigy who built the search engine Sogou and ran it until its acquisition by Tencent, stepping down in 2021. For years he was one of China’s most prominent search-and-language technologists — exactly the background that positioned him to move on large language models.

Building China’s answer to OpenAI

As ChatGPT swept the world in early 2023, Wang posted on Weibo that “China needs its own OpenAI,” and within weeks acted on it: in April 2023 he founded Baichuan AI (百川智能), raising tens of millions in seed funding and quickly shipping open-source models — Baichuan-7B and the 13-billion-parameter Baichuan-13B — trained on Chinese and English data. Baichuan became one of the country’s most closely watched LLM startups, reaching unicorn status with backing from Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi.

Wang has since narrowed Baichuan’s focus toward AI in healthcare — building “AI doctors” and medical models — a pivot that reflects both his conviction that foundation models are transformative and the intense competition among China’s many LLM contenders. His stance is unambiguously pro: he treats advanced AI as a national and civilisational necessity, and staked his post-Sogou career on building it.