Zhipu AI, among China’s most appealing oppositions to OpenAI, has actually gotten financing from the nation’s food shipment huge Meituan, which has a market cap of around $100 billion at the time of composing.
An affiliate of Zhipu AI just recently included a Meituan subsidiary as its investor, which now owns a 10% stake in the company, regional media reported pointing out service filing details. The start-up hasn’t divulged its specific financing to date, just stating it raised “numerous million yuan” ($ 1 = 7.23 yuan) from a Series B round last September. Its financiers consist of Qiming Endeavor Partners, Legend Capital and Tsinghua Holdings.
A wide range of Chinese business are working to establish big language designs (LLMs) that might possibly challenge their Western equivalents. One such business, Zhipu AI, comes from the scholastic world, having drew out of the nation’s distinguished Tsinghua University Established in 2019, the start-up is led by Tang Jie, a teacher in the university’s Department of Computer technology and Innovation.
Zhipu just recently open-sourced its multilingual (Chinese and English) conversational AI design ChatGLM-6B, which is trained on 6 billion specifications and claims to be able to perform reasonings on a single consumer-grade graphics card, considerably decreasing the expense of running an LLM. It likewise formerly open-sourced a more robust, general-purpose version, the GLM-130B trained on 130 billion specifications. Its user-facing chatbot app ChatGLM is presently in a close beta stage initially targeted at scholastic and market gamers.
Meituan’s financial investment came at a curious time. Simply 3 weeks earlier, the Chinese web giant revealed it would be obtaining Light Years Beyond, another popular LLM gamer in China, for a significant $234 million, regardless of the start-up’s creation just 4 months prior. The modification in ownership followed Light Years Beyond’s creator, Wang Huiwen, who’s likewise the billionaire co-founder of Meituan, revealed his resignation from all business functions at the food shipment giant due to health factors.
These financial investments are anticipated to offer Meituan’s AI abilities a huge skill increase. In turn, the AI companies stand to acquire by possibly tapping Meituan’s large reach of 450 million users purchasing food, purchasing groceries, or reserving hotels with the on-demand platform.