China’s Zhipu AI, a strong challenger to OpenAI, has secured funding from Meituan, a leading food delivery giant in the country. Meituan, with a market capitalization of approximately $100 billion, has acquired a 10% stake in Zhipu AI through one of its subsidiaries. The exact amount of funding remains undisclosed, but Zhipu AI confirmed raising hundreds of million yuan in a Series B round last September. Notable investors in the startup include Qiming Venture Partners, Legend Capital, and Tsinghua Holdings.
Numerous Chinese companies are striving to develop large language models (LLMs) that can potentially rival their Western counterparts. Zhipu AI, a spinoff from China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, emerged from the academic sphere. The startup, established in 2019 and led by Professor Tang Jie from Tsinghua’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, recently made its bilingual conversational AI model, ChatGLM-6B, open-source. This model, trained on six billion parameters, claims to enable inferences on a single consumer-grade graphics card, significantly reducing the cost of operating an LLM. Zhipu AI has also open-sourced a more versatile LLM variant, the GLM-130B, trained on 130 billion parameters. Currently, its user-facing chatbot app, ChatGLM, is in a closed beta phase primarily targeting academic and industry players.
Meituan’s investment in Zhipu AI comes at an interesting time. Just three weeks ago, the Chinese internet giant announced its acquisition of Light Years Beyond, another prominent player in the LLM space, for a substantial $234 million. The timing aligns with the recent resignation of Light Years Beyond’s founder, Wang Huiwen, who is also a billionaire co-founder of Meituan, from all corporate positions at the food delivery giant due to health reasons.
Meituan aims to bolster its AI capabilities through these investments, while the AI companies stand to benefit from potential access to Meituan’s extensive user base of 450 million individuals who utilize the platform for ordering food, purchasing groceries, and booking hotels.
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