Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as "Zhipu AI") announced today that it has received a total of more than 2.5 billion yuan in financing this year. Participants mainly include the Zhongguancun Independent Innovation Fund of the Social Security Fund (Legend Capital is the fund manager), Meituan, Ant, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Kingsoft, Shunwei, Boss Direct Pin, TAL, Sequoia, Hillhouse and other institutions, as well as some old shareholders including Legend Capital.
Zhipu AI stated that the above financing will be used for further research and development of large-scale base models to better support the industry ecology and develop rapidly with partners.
Zhipu AI was founded in 2019 and was born out of Tsinghua KEG (Knowledge Engineering Laboratory). In June 2023, in the inventory of Silicon Valley technology media The Information, Zhipu AI was regarded as one of the five companies most likely to become "China OpenAI".
Zhang Peng, CEO of Zhipu AI, believes that the next generation of technology should be cognitive intelligence. The problems that cognitive intelligence technology needs to solve are different from the previous generation of perceptual intelligence. For example, multi-modality requires a larger amount of data, more human-like intelligence capabilities, and some general capabilities for multi-tasks and multiple scenarios, etc.
Zhang Peng once said in an interview that for example, people often hear the slogan "surpassing ChatGPT" now, but it is not easy to break it down and define it clearly. For example, what ability does surpassing ChatGPT mean to catch up with it? Is it surpassing it on a certain list? Does being on the list mean transcendence? "I think that by recognizing the essence of things, we can avoid unnecessary consumption."
It is reported that the field of large models is becoming a popular track.
Just this week, Baichuan Intelligence, founded by former Sogou CEO Wang Xiaochuan, also announced the completion of the A1 round of strategic financing, with a financing amount of US$300 million. Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi and other technology giants and many top investment institutions participated in the investment and financing.
Including the US$50 million from the angel round, the financing amount of Baichuan Intelligent has reached US$350 million. Less than half a year after its establishment, it became a technology unicorn.