Source: Titanium Media
Image source: Generated by Wujie AI
On November 10th, Titanium Media App exclusively learned that Zhipu AI, a unicorn company in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) large models invested by Alibaba and Tencent, is undergoing a new round of financing with a valuation of 20 billion yuan.
Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as "Zhipu AI") responded to Titanium Media App that they have no comment on this news.
As early as October 20th, Zhipe AI announced that the total amount of financing this year has exceeded 2.5 billion yuan, with investors including Meituan, Ant Group, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Kingsoft, Shunwei, Sequoia Capital, and Hillhouse Capital. At that time, Caixin reported that the company's valuation had exceeded 10 billion yuan.
Calculating from this point in time, in just one month, the valuation of Zhipe AI has nearly doubled.
An industry insider told Titanium Media App that Zhipe AI is currently selecting the next round of investment institutions, but several shareholders have expressed some degree of doubt about this "doubling" high valuation.
It is reported that Zhipe AI was established in June 2019, born out of the team of the Knowledge Engineering Laboratory of the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University, and is an entrepreneurial company for the transformation of knowledge achievements at Tsinghua University. The CEO of the company, Zhang Peng, graduated from the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University, and Wang Shaolan is a leading innovative doctor at Tsinghua. Tang Jie, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University, also participated in the research and development of China's largest-scale pre-training model, Wudao 2.0.
In 2020, Zhipe AI began the research and development of the GLM pre-training architecture and trained a 10 billion parameter model, GLM-10B; in 2021, it successfully trained a trillion sparse model using the MoE architecture; in 2022, it announced the 130 billion-level ultra-large-scale pre-training universal model, GLM-130B, and used it to build a large model platform and product matrix.
At the end of 2022, with the official release of the AI chatbot model product ChatGPT, it triggered a new wave of AI enthusiasm worldwide. Due to the early deployment of large model technology products by Zhipe AI, the company immediately became one of the important participants in the domestic AI large model field.
In 2023, Zhipe AI launched the ChatGLM dialogue model with a trillion parameters and open-sourced the single-card version model ChatGLM-6B, deployed in the personal developer and enterprise application fields. In June of this year, Zhipe AI iterated to release ChatGLM2, including models with 6B, 130B, 12B (120 billion parameters), 32B, 66B, etc., with a 42% increase in inference speed; in October of this year, Zhipe AI released the all-new self-developed third-generation base large model ChatGLM3 series, including three models with 1.5B, 3B, and 6B parameters, with an inference speed improvement of 2-3 times compared to the best open-source model.
Currently, Zhipe AI's open-source models have been downloaded more than 10 million times worldwide. At the same time, the company is also exploring commercialization, creating a matrix of AIGC (Generative AI) models and products, including the approved online Zhipe Qingyan and the high-efficiency code model CodeGeeX.
According to Titanium Media App, Zhipe AI mainly sells three types of technical services: digital human SaaS/PaaS solutions, technology intelligence SaaS/PaaS solutions, and cognitive large model PaaS/MaaS platform solutions.
In terms of financing, in the four-plus years since its establishment, Zhipe AI has completed four rounds of financing, with investors including Junlian Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, Zhongke Chuangxing, Meituan, Ant Group, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Kingsoft, Shunwei, Boss Zhipin, TAL Education Group, Sequoia Capital, and Hillhouse Capital, among many other institutions.
According to Zhang Peng, Zhipe AI's GLM large model has been applied in fields such as government affairs, finance, energy, manufacturing, and healthcare, supporting more than 10 domestic hardware ecosystems including Huawei Ascend, Shenwei supercomputing, and Haiguang DCU. The company's partners include Alibaba, Tencent Cloud, Volcano Engine, Huawei, Meituan, Microsoft, OPPO, and Haitian Rui Sheng, among dozens of other companies.
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