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Stepfun (阶跃星辰)

Stepfun (阶跃星辰)

Stepfun (阶跃星辰) is a prominent Chinese AI startup founded by Dr. Jiang Daxin (former VP of Microsoft Research Asia), focusing on developing advanced multi-modal foundation models with trillion-parameter scale.

Key Features

  • Trillion-Parameter MoE: Stepfun has successfully developed Step-2, a massive trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) large language model.
  • Native Multi-modality: Strong focus on native integration of text, vision, and audio capabilities from the ground up.
  • Step-1V / Step-1.5V: Highly capable vision-language models that excel in image understanding, OCR, and visual reasoning.
  • Yueqiao (跃问): Stepfun's consumer-facing AI assistant application that showcases their foundation models' capabilities.

Target Audience

  • Enterprises and developers seeking powerful Chinese foundation models via API.
  • Researchers and developers tracking the frontier of Chinese LLM development.
  • Consumers using the Yueqiao (跃问) app for daily AI assistance.

How it compares to alternatives

Stepfun is considered one of the "Six Little Dragons" (new AI unicorns) of China's foundation model landscape, alongside DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, Baichuan, and Zhipu AI. Stepfun differentiates itself with a very strong pedigree in search engineering (from Microsoft) and an aggressive push towards native multi-modality and trillion-parameter scale MoE architectures, aiming for GPT-4 class capabilities.

Official Resources

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