Image Credits: Zhipu AI
Zhipu AI, one of China’s most promising challengers to OpenAI, has received funding from the country’s food delivery giant Meituan, which has a market cap of nearly $100 billion at the time of writing.
An affiliate of Zhipu AI recently added a Meituan subsidiary as its owner, which now owns a 10% stake in the company, local media reported citing business filing information. The startup has not disclosed its exact funding so far, saying only that it raised “hundreds of million yuan” ($1 = 7.23 yuan) from a Series B round in September. Its investors include Qiming Venture Partners, Legend Capital and Tsinghua Holdings.
Many Chinese companies are working to develop large-scale language models (LLMs) that could potentially challenge their Western counterparts. One such company, Zhipu AI, comes from the field of academia, emerging from the country’s prestigious Tsinghua University. Founded in 2019, the startup is led by Tang Jie, a professor in the university’s Department of Computer Science and Technology.
Zhipu recently unveiled the bilingual (Chinese and English) AI model ChatGLM-6B, which is trained on six billion parameters and claims to be able to make inferences on a consumer-grade graphics card, which can lower the cost of running an LLM. It also previously unveiled a more robust, general-purpose variant, the GLM-130B trained on 130 billion parameters. The user-facing chatbot app ChatGLM is currently in a near-beta phase. primarily aimed at academic and industrial players.
Meituan’s investment came at an unusual time. Just three weeks ago, the Chinese internet giant announced that they would acquire Light Years Beyond, another prominent LLM player in China, for a whopping $234 million, despite the startup only four months ago. The change in ownership comes after Light Years Beyond’s founder, Wang Huiwen, who is also the billionaire co-founder of Meituan, announced his resignation from all corporate roles at the food delivery giant due to health reasons.
These investments are expected to give Meituan’s AI capabilities a major talent boost. In turn, AI companies stand to gain by potentially tapping Meituan’s vast reach of 450 million users who order food, buy groceries, or book hotels with the on-demand platform.