It is becoming increasingly clear that two parallel AI universes are forming between the United States and China. While the US has produced notable players such as her OpenAI and Anthropic, China has its own emerging candidates. One of these basic model developers, Zhipu AI, announced Today, the company announced that it has raised a total of 2.5 billion yuan ($340 million) so far this year.
Established in 2019, Chipu was Spun out from China’s prestigious Tsinghua University and is led by Tang and Jieprofessor in the university’s Department of Computer Science and Technology.
This announcement came at a sensitive time. This week, the Biden administration imposed additional restrictions on Nvidia AI chip exports to China, further hampering rivals’ ability to train large-scale language models. In anticipation of Washington’s semiconductor ban, China’s deep-pocketed AI companies are stockpiling semiconductors, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these coveted chips.
To stay in this expensive AI race, Zhipu is keeping itself well-funded by raising money from local investors. The $340 million investment was made from a renminbi-denominated fund, marking a shift from a two-decade trend in which US dollar funds were the preferred funding source until geopolitical tensions created a technology gap.
In August, President Joe Biden signed the agreement. presidential order Excludes U.S. investments in key Chinese technology areas including AI, semiconductors, and quantum computing. Although aimed at curbing China’s military buildup, the order also had a negative impact on China-focused U.S. venture capital, which currently avoids investing in sensitive areas. Some companies, such as Sequoia Capital China and GGV Capital, which were renamed Hongshan, are looking for solutions to continue operating in the market by spinning off their China divisions.
HonShan invested in Zhipu along with other prominent VCs such as Shunwei Capital and Hillhouse Capital, as well as state funds managed by Legend Capital.
The AI startup has also raised funding from an impressive roster of Chinese internet giants, bringing together even its biggest rivals like Alibaba and Tencent, which rarely co-invest. The lineup includes Ant Group, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Meituan, Kingsoft, TAL Education Group, and Boss Zhipin.
Zhipu recently open sourced a bilingual (Chinese and English) conversational AI model. Chat GLM-6Bhas been trained with 6 billion parameters and claims to be able to: Run inference on a single consumer graphics card. We also have an open source foundational model, GLM-130B, trained with 130 billion parameters.
Source: techcrunch.com
