A Chinese lab hit $1.4 billion before shipping a single model.
Beijing startup Naive AI has raised $400 million in three rounds since February, Chinese outlets report. Fewer than 100 people work there, and the first model is due this month. It will not pretrain from scratch, but reshape an existing open Chinese model instead.
Why it mattersTraining a model from zero now costs more than most startups can ever raise. If polishing someone else's open model works, the price of a frontier lab collapses.
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