Zhipu AI, one of China’s OpenAI challengers, has received funding from the country’s food delivery giant Meituan which has a market cap of around $100 billion.
Local media reported that Zhipu AI has added Meituan subsidiary as its shareholder with 10% stake in the firm. Its investors include Qiming Venture Partners, Legend Capital and Tsinghua Holdings.
Zhipu recently open-sourced its bilingual (Chinese and English) conversational AI model ChatGLM-6B, which is trained on six billion parameters and claims to be able to carry out inferences on a single consumer-grade graphics card, significantly lowering the cost of running an LLM. It also previously open-sourced a more robust, general-purpose variant, the GLM-130B trained on 130 billion parameters.
Meituan’s investment came after its acquisition of Light Years Beyond for $234 million.
