Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology Co., Ltd. ("Zhipu AI" for short) announced 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, etc. Institutions and some old shareholders, including Legend Capital, followed the investment, with Huaxing serving as the exclusive financial advisor. The announcement stated that the above-mentioned 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. It is a company transformed from the technical achievements of the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University. It is committed to creating a new generation of cognitive intelligence general models. The company jointly developed the bilingual 100-billion-level ultra-large-scale pre-training model GLM-130B, and built a high-precision universal knowledge graph to form a cognitive engine driven by two wheels of data and knowledge. Based on this model, ChatGLM (chatglm.cn) was created.
In addition, Zhipu AI has also launched Bigmodel.ai, a cognitive large model platform, including products such as CodeGeeX and CogView to provide intelligent API services. Zhipu AI was founded by Professor Tang Jie from the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University. The core members of the team have participated in the research and development of "Enlightenment", a joint project between Tsinghua University and Zhiyuan Research Institute.
In August 2022, the high-precision bilingual dense multi-billion large model GLM-130B, jointly developed by Tsinghua University's Knowledge Engineering Laboratory and Zhipu AI, was officially launched. In the same year, it was the only global mainstream large model in Asia selected for Stanford evaluation. In September of the same year, Zhipu AI completed hundreds of millions of yuan in Series B financing and released CodeGeeX, a code generation model with a scale of 13 billion parameters. In March 2023, the conversation model ChatGLM-6B and the billion conversation model ChatGLM (internal beta version) were released.
Currently, Zhipu AI’s open source model has been downloaded more than 10 million times worldwide.