Wang Xiaochuan, Founder and CEO of Baichuan Intelligence

TMTPOST -- After months of silence, Chinese AI startup Baichuan Intelligence, founded by former Sogou CEO Wang Xiaochuan, unveiled its latest large language model on Sunday, targeting the fast-growing AI healthcare market.

The new model, Baichuan-M2, is an open-source, medically enhanced LLM designed for private deployment in clinical settings. To address privacy concerns and cost constraints in healthcare, Baichuan says M2 is extremely lightweight — capable of running on a single RTX 4090 GPU after quantization — slashing deployment costs to about $1,400, or roughly 1/57th of DeepSeek-R1 H20 ’ s dual-node setup. The model is also compatible with mainstream domestic chips, enabling hospitals to roll it out on existing hardware.

On the HealthBench medical benchmark, Baichuan-M2 scored 60.1, surpassing OpenAI ’ s gpt-oss120b ( 57.6 ) and other open-source leaders like Qwen3-235B and Kimi K2. In a harder subset of the benchmark, which OpenAI debuted with GPT-5 earlier this year, Baichuan-M2 scored 34.7 — making it the second model in the world to exceed the 32-point threshold.

"Building models for life and creating doctors for humanity is Baichuan ’ s mission," Wang said, calling medical foundation models the "crown jewel" of AI research. He added that healthcare is the most representative industry for AI ’ s potential to "create people" — not just tools.

Founded in 2023, Baichuan has raised three funding rounds, including a $690 million Series A in July 2024, and is preparing a Series B at a $2.75 billion valuation. The company has already deployed AI pediatricians in Beijing Children ’ s Hospital and launched specialized models like the "Futang · Baichuan" pediatric foundation model.

The M2 model introduces an upgraded AI Patient Simulator and boosts processing speeds by 58.5% in critical care and outpatient scenarios compared with its predecessor. In clinical trials, M2 accurately diagnosed complex cases — such as hypothyroidism in a patient with persistent fatigue and neck swelling — based on nuanced symptom analysis.

Baichuan ’ s launch comes amid intensifying competition in AI healthcare, with ByteDance and Ant Group both rolling out standalone AI medical assistant apps in recent weeks. Frost & Sullivan projects China ’ s AI healthcare market will balloon from $1.2 billion in 2023 to $42.5 billion in 2033, a 43% annual growth rate.