Meituan, a major Chinese food delivery company with a market cap of almost $100 billion as of this writing, has invested in Zhipu AI, one of the most promising OpenAI rivals in China.
According to business filings, a Meituan subsidiary that was already a shareholder in a Zhipu AI affiliate was recently added as a shareholder and now holds 10% of the company.
The company hasn’t specified how much money it has received to date. All that is known is that it raised “hundreds of million yuan” in a Series B investment last September. Qiming Venture Partners, Legend Capital, and Tsinghua Holdings are some of its financiers.
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Many Chinese businesses are striving to create large language models (LLMs) that might compete with their Western counterparts. One such business, Zhipu AI, is academic in origin, having been established by the renowned Tsinghua University in China. Tang Jie, a professor in the university’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, is the startup’s founder and CEO.
Recently, Zhipu released the source code for its ChatGLM-6B multilingual (Chinese and English) conversational AI model. This model is trained on six billion parameters and boasts the ability to perform LLM inferences on a single consumer-grade graphics card.
A more reliable, all-purpose variation, the GLM-130B trained on 130 billion parameters, was also previously open-sourced by the company. A close beta version of ChatGLM, its user-facing chatbot application, is currently available, intended initially at academic and professional players.
