Alibaba leads $290 million investment for building a new kind of AI model as LLM limits emerge

Summary

Alibaba Cloud led a 2 billion yuan ($290 million) series B investment in ShengShu, the startup behind the AI video generation tool Vidu, with TAL Education and Baidu Ventures also participating. ShengShu says it will use the funding to develop a "general world model" built on vision, audio and touch data that bridges digital games and video with physical settings such as autonomous driving and robots. The article presents world models as an alternative to large language models trained primarily on text.