Meituan Backs China's Zhipu AI, the OpenAI Challenger
Zhipu AI, a prominent contender to OpenAI in China, has secured funding from the country's leading food delivery giant, Meituan, which currently holds a market cap of approximately $100 billion.
According to local media reports, a subsidiary of Zhipu AI recently welcomed Meituan as a shareholder, holding a 10% stake in the company. Though the exact funding amount remains undisclosed, Zhipu AI mentioned raising "hundreds of million yuan" in its Series B round last September. Notable investors in the startup include Qiming Venture Partners, Legend Capital, and Tsinghua Holdings.
Numerous Chinese companies are actively developing large language models (LLMs) to potentially rival their Western counterparts. Zhipu AI is among these companies and originated from the esteemed Tsinghua University in an academic context. Established in 2019, the startup is spearheaded by Tang Jie, a professor in the university's Department of Computer Science and Technology.
Recently, Zhipu AI made headlines by open-sourcing its bilingual conversational AI model, ChatGLM-6B, which can execute inferences on a single consumer-grade graphics card due to its training on six billion parameters. This breakthrough significantly reduces the cost of running an LLM. In addition, the company previously open-sourced the GLM-130B, a more robust, general-purpose variant trained on 130 billion parameters. Their user-facing chatbot app, ChatGLM, is currently in a closed beta phase, initially targeting academic and industry players.
Meituan's decision to invest in Zhipu AI comes at an intriguing time. Merely three weeks ago, the Chinese internet giant declared its acquisition of Light Years Beyond, another notable LLM player in China, for an impressive $234 million. Notably, Light Years Beyond's founder, Wang Huiwen, who is also the billionaire co-founder of Meituan, resigned from all corporate roles at the food delivery giant due to health reasons, leading to the change in ownership.
This strategic investment by Meituan is anticipated to significantly enhance its AI capabilities. Simultaneously, Zhipu AI and other AI firms stand to benefit by gaining access to Meituan's extensive user base, consisting of 450 million individuals engaging with the platform for ordering food, purchasing groceries, and booking hotels on-demand. This mutually beneficial partnership has the potential to drive innovation and growth in the AI landscape in China.
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