21/07/2023 (China) - Zhipu AI, a Chinese startup seen as a promising challenger to OpenAI, recently received funding from Meituan, China's food delivery giant. Meituan acquired a 10% stake in Zhipu AI through one of its subsidiaries, enhancing the startup's financial prospects. Zhipu AI, originating from Tsinghua University in 2019 and led by Professor Tang Jie, aims to create advanced conversational AI models that can operate efficiently on a single consumer-grade graphics card, reducing costs.
Notably, Zhipu AI open-sourced its bilingual conversational AI model, ChatGLM-6B, with six billion parameters. This move aims to lower entry barriers for developers and researchers interested in large language models. The company also open-sourced a more robust variant, GLM-130B, with 130 billion parameters.
Currently, Zhipu AI is testing its user-facing chatbot app, ChatGLM, to provide an interactive and intelligent conversational experience. The app targets academic and industry users. Meituan's investment enables Zhipu AI to tap into its vast user base of 450 million individuals for potential expansion.
Meituan's investment in Zhipu AI comes after its acquisition of another Chinese LLM player, Light Years Beyond, for $234 million. These investments aim to strengthen Meituan's AI capabilities and provide a talent boost to the AI firms.
The collaboration between Zhipu AI and Meituan reflects the growing interest and investment in AI technology in China. Chinese companies are striving to compete with Western counterparts in the artificial intelligence field by developing advanced language models. The open-sourcing of ChatGLM-6B by Zhipu AI fosters collaboration, knowledge sharing, and innovation in the AI domain.
Zhipu AI stands at the forefront of technological advancements as China continues to invest in AI research and development. Supported by Meituan and other investors, startups like Zhipu AI have the potential to contribute significantly to the field of artificial intelligence. The future looks promising for Zhipu AI as it continues to develop cutting-edge language models and expand its presence in the industry.