Organisation · lab · CN

StepFun

Multimodal foundation models — the Step series, spanning language, vision and audio.

1 entry · July 2024

StepFun is a Shanghai AI lab founded in 2023 by Jiang Daxin, a former Microsoft executive, and counted among the group of well-funded Chinese startups investors dubbed the country's "AI tigers". It has concentrated from the outset on multimodal foundation models — its Step series spans language, vision and audio — pitching that breadth as its point of difference from rivals focused on text. Backed by investors including Tencent, it releases some models as open weights and by 2026 was shipping trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts systems, though it remains smaller than China's largest AI developers.

Category
Chinese AI labs
Founded
2023
HQ
Shanghai, CN
Funding
Tencent-backed
Key people
Jiang Daxin

Appears alongside

Tracks

  • Models & capabilities 1
  • Open weights & ecosystem 1

  1. StepFun launches Step-2, a trillion-parameter MoE model

    StepFun said the mixture-of-experts model approximated GPT-4 on maths, logic, coding and dialogue; it was unveiled alongside a multimodal and an image-generation model at WAIC.

    Models & capabilities · Open weights & ecosystem