China’s OpenAI challenger Zhipu AI gets Meituan funding – One of China’s most promising and likely competent challengers in the AI market Zhipu AI has just received funding from Meituan the country’s food delivery powerhouse. Meituan has a current market cap of around $100 billion at the time of writing
Currently, Zhipu AI seems to be the only AI company fit enough to stand toe to toe with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and has shown promise.
According to local media citing corporate filings, a Zhipu AI affiliate recently joined a Meituan subsidiary as a shareholder, giving the firm a 10% stake. The business has not disclosed the amount of investment it has received to date, simply stating that it received “hundreds of million yuan” ($1 = 7.23 yuan) in a Series B round last September. Qiming Venture Partners, Legend Capital, and Tsinghua Holdings are among its investors.
Several Chinese companies are currently working hard to develop large language models (LLMs) that can be competent enough to challenge their Western counterparts. One such company, Zhipu AI, for example, emerged from the academic sphere, having been born at the country’s prestigious Tsinghua University. Led by Tang Jie, the startup was Founded in 2019. Tang Jie is a professor in the university’s Department of Computer Science and Technology.
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Zhipu recently open-sourced ChatGLM-6B, a bilingual (Chinese and English) conversational AI model trained on six billion parameters that promise to be able to perform inferences on a single consumer-grade graphics card, considerably cutting the cost of running an LLM. It has previously open-sourced the GLM-130B, a more robust, general-purpose derivative trained on 130 billion parameters. ChatGLM, its user-facing chatbot app, is now in closed beta. Initially aimed at academic and industrial participants.
Meituan’s investment arrived at an interesting time. Only three weeks ago, the Chinese internet behemoth announced the acquisition of Light Years Beyond, another key LLM player in China, for a whopping $234 million, despite the startup’s creation only four months prior. Light Years Beyond’s founder, Wang Huiwen, who is also the millionaire co-founder of Meituan, announced his departure from all corporate duties at the food delivery behemoth due to health issues.
These investments are likely to significantly increase Meituan’s AI capabilities. In turn, the AI businesses stand to benefit from possibly harnessing Meituan’s massive reach of 450 million people who use the on-demand platform to order food, buy groceries, or book hotels.
