Meituan Launches Another Big Model, Exclusive Investment in "Zhipu AI" | LongChina50 Exclusive

Tech 2023-07-20 16:41:37 Source: Network

Article | Zhou Xinyu and Deng YongyiEditor | Su Jianxun and Yang XuanThe AI big model entrepreneurship with hot money surging has come to an end, a key investment centered around top AI startups.36 Kr learned from multiple independent sources that AI large model company Zhipu Huazhang (hereinafter referred to as "Zhipu") had completed the B-2 round of financing several months ago, with an amount of hundreds of millions of RMB

Article | Zhou Xinyu and Deng Yongyi

Editor | Su Jianxun and Yang Xuan

The AI big model entrepreneurship with hot money surging has come to an end, a key investment centered around top AI startups.

36 Kr learned from multiple independent sources that AI large model company Zhipu Huazhang (hereinafter referred to as "Zhipu") had completed the B-2 round of financing several months ago, with an amount of hundreds of millions of RMB. It was exclusively invested by Meituan Zhantou, with a valuation of nearly 500 million US dollars after this round of investment. It is understood that the subsequent rounds of financing for Zhipu have also been completed.

For the above financing information, Zhipu has officially confirmed.

This is also one of the few recent fundraisings worth over one billion US dollars. The AI startup companies that previously received financing mostly amounted to millions or tens of millions of US dollars, and the few that could come up with their own self-developed models are still one step away from the billion yuan club.

An investor told 36 Kr that a startup company that can earn billions of dollars requires a combination of top-level teams and self-developed large model technology, as well as successful landing experience - and such companies are currently within the reach of a single hand in China.

In the field of AI large model research, the Zhipu team has always been highly regarded in the industry. It was established in 2019 and was transformed from the technical achievements of the Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (KEG) of Tsinghua University.

Born in Tsinghua Natural Language Laboratory, the core team of Zhipu can be described as luxurious: Zhang Peng, the designer and developer of XLORE, the first cross language Knowledge graph system in China that is balanced in both Chinese and English, served as CEO, and most of the team members came from Tsinghua Computer Department.

Data, computing power, and talent are essential admission tickets for big model entrepreneurs. As early as 2021, Zhiyuan had basically gathered all the elements.

An insider told 36 Krypton that thanks to the open source intelligence analysis project started nearly 20 years ago, the team not only launched the scientific and technological intelligence Big data mining and service system platform AMiner in 2006, but also accumulated rich bilingual data and first-line engineering experience for the research and development of the big model. And large-scale computing power is solved through "clever efforts" such as renting supercomputing platforms and collaborating with research institutions such as Zhiyuan.

In August 2022, Zhipu and KEG jointly launched the 100 billion level Chinese and English pre trained language model GLM-130B. According to observations, apart from internet companies such as Alibaba, Zhipu was the first startup to attempt a hundred billion level language model at that time.

The performance of GLM-130B has also been recognized. A study by the Stanford University Center for Basic Model Research shows that GLM-130B can approach or maintain parity with OpenAI's large model GPT-3175B in terms of accuracy and malice metrics. This model, which has established its position in the Zhipu industry, has been applied for use by 266 institutions in 41 countries worldwide. According to 36 Krypton, the organizations applying for use include Tencent, ByteDance and other leading Internet companies.

In March of this year, Zhipu opened up the lightweight model ChatGLM-6B for Chinese English bilingual dialogue with 6.2 billion parameters, which supports users to use reasoning on a single consumer grade graphics card. At the same time, ChatGLM, a language generation application based on the GLM-130B base, was also launched at the same time and has started internal testing.

Even though there are still common problems with large models such as weak mathematical processing and logical reasoning abilities, ChatGLM-6B has made up for the timeliness shortcomings that ChatGPT has not yet solved. A person familiar with the situation introduced 36 Krypton that ChatGLM-6B knows that Twitter's current CEO is ElonMusk, based on the technology accumulated by the team through business collaboration and research.

With the support of multiple resources and technological capabilities, Zhipu is particularly popular among a group of new AI forces.

In September 2022, Zhipu completed a round B financing of 100 million yuan, led by Junlian Capital and Qiming Venture Partners. The entry of internet capital in this round signifies that the development of large models has quickly entered the stage of application implementation from research-oriented exploration.

A person familiar with the matter told 36 Krypton that Zhipu's algorithm has already performed quite well in optimizing Meituan's advertising algorithm.

Meituan has been seeking opportunities to integrate AI and business. As early as February 2018, Meituan Dianping set up the Al Platform Department - NLP (Natural language processing) Center to provide text semantic understanding services for various businesses, including intelligent customer service, scenario based store finding and search. Wang Zhongyuan, a former Facebook (now Meta) Research Scientist, a researcher in charge of Microsoft Research Asia, and now a vice president of Kwai Technology, is the leader of the NLP Center.

In the organizational restructuring in mid-2020, the Meituan Review Search and NLP department was incorporated into the newly established AI platform, with Xia Huaxia, the former senior engineer at Google and chief architect at Baidu, serving as the head scientist of Meituan.

Since the explosion of ChatGPT, it is not uncommon for internet companies to rely on investment to jointly build an AI ecosystem. For example, Zhihu invests in Wall Intelligence and jointly develops the large model "Zhihai Chart AI". Holding hands with Zhipu, Meituan has found itself an ally with more mature technology and business.

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