Introduction:
One of the most promising OpenAI competitors in the nation, Zhipu AI Gets Meituan Funding has received funding from Meituan, a significant Chinese food delivery service with a market value of approximately $100 billion as of this writing.
A Meituan subsidiary already a shareholder in a Zhipu AI affiliate was recently added as a shareholder and now owns 10% of the company, according to local media using information from corporate records. However, it is known that the company raised “hundreds of million yuan” ($1 = 7.23 yuan) in a Series B investment last September. The company has yet to disclose how much money it has received. Some of its financiers include Tsinghua Holdings, Legend Capital, and Qiming Venture Partners.
Large language models (LLMs) are a goal of many Chinese enterprises that hope to compete with their Western counterparts. One such company, Zhipu AI, has its roots in academics and is a spinoff of China’s renowned Tsinghua University. The company was founded in 2019 by Tang Jie, a professor in the university’s Department of Computer Science and Technology.
Zhipu AI Gets Meituan Funding:
The source code for Zhipu’s ChatGLM-6B bilingual (Chinese and English) conversational AI model was just made available. This model can carry out LLM inferences on a single consumer-grade graphics card and was trained on six billion parameters. A more resilient general-purpose variant known as the GLM-130B trained on 130 billion parameters was previously open-sourced. Its user-facing chatbot program ChatGLM is now in a close beta stage. At first, it was geared toward players in academia and the industry.
Meituan’s investment came at an odd time. Despite the startup’s brief four-month existence, the Chinese internet juggernaut recently declared its intention to pay a staggering $234 million to acquire Light Years Beyond, another prominent LLM player in China. Ownership of the meal delivery behemoth changed after wealthy co-founder of Meituan and founder of Light Years Beyond Wang Huiwen announced his retirement from all business posts owing to health difficulties.
Meituan’s AI skills are expected to increase significantly due to these efforts. AI businesses may profit from the 450 million Meituan users who use the on-demand platform to order food, grocery shops, or book hotels.
