New Delhi:- Zhipu AI, one of China's most promising OpenAI challengers, is funded by Meituan, a national food supplier with a market capitalization of around $100 billion at the time of writing.

Zhipu AI's subsidiary recently added Meituan's subsidiary as a shareholder and now owns 10% of the company's shares, local media reported, citing business documents. The company did not disclose the exact funding, only saying it raised "hundreds of millions of yuan" (7.23 yuan to the dollar) in a Series B round last September.

Investors include Qiming Venture Partners, Legend Capital, Qinghua Holdings and others. Various Chinese companies are working on large-scale language models (LLMs) that could challenge Western companies.

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One such company, Zhipu AI, has its roots in academia and evolved out of the country's renowned Tsinghua University. Founded in 2019, the startup is led by Tang Jie, a professor in the University's Department of Computer Science. 

Zhipu recently released an open-source bilingual (Chinese and English) conversational AI model ChatGLM-6B. This model is said to be trained on his 6 billion parameters and can run inference on a single consumer graphics card, which greatly increases LLM's operating costs. reduction.

A more robust general-purpose variant, GLM-130B, was also previously offered as an open-source solution trained on 130 billion parameters. User-oriented chatbot app ChatGLM is currently in a tight beta stage. Initially, it was aimed at those involved in science and industry.

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Meituan's investment came at a strange time. Just three weeks ago, the Chinese internet giant acquired Light Years Beyond, another prominent LLM provider in China, for a whopping $234 million, even though it was only four months old. announced. The change in ownership comes as Transcendental founder and billionaire Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen announced his resignation from all positions at the food delivery giant, citing health concerns. was done later.

These investments are expected to bring Meituan a significant addition of talent to his AI capabilities. Next, the AI ​​company will benefit from potentially leveraging Meituan's vast reach of 450 million users who order food, buy groceries and book hotels through an on-demand platform.

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The new AI named as the Zhipu AI has got a huge support from the food delivery company named as the Meituan who has got added as the shareholder of the Zhipu and made a funding to it which has a market cap of $100 Billion.