The funding announcement follows a similar one from Baichuan, another Chinese AI startup, which recently secured a $300 million investment from many of the same companies. Baichuan, which competes with Zhipu in the large language model market, is now reportedly worth over $1 billion. Both companies are part of a growing trend of AI startups raising significant funding, with Amazon.com Inc. planning to invest up to $4 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic, and Paris-based Mistral AI raising $113 million to build large language models.
Key takeaways:
- Chinese AI startup Zhipu has raised over $342 million in funding since the start of the year, with investors including Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, and Meituan.
- Zhipu, which spun out of Tsinghua University in 2019, is focused on developing large language models similar to GPT-4, and offers a chatbot called Qingyan.
- The company has developed two open-source large language models, GLM-130B and ChatGLM-6B, with 130 billion and six billion parameters respectively.
- Zhipu's funding announcement follows a similar one from Baichuan, another Chinese AI startup that secured a $300 million investment and is now reportedly worth over $1 billion.