It is increasingly evident that two parallel AI universes are forming between the United States and China. While the United States has produced notable players like OpenAI and Anthropic, China has its own emerging candidates. One of these basic model developers, Zhipu AI, announced that it raised 2.500 billion yuan ($340 million) in total financing.
Founded in 2019, Zhipu emerged from the prestigious Tsinghua University in China and is directed by Tang Jie, professor in the university's Department of Computer Science and Technology.
The announcement comes at a delicate time. This week, the Biden administration imposed additional restrictions on the export of chips from Artificial Intelligence from Nvidia to China, further impeding its rival's ability to train large language models (LLM). In anticipation of Washington's semiconductor bans, deep-pocketed Chinese AI companies have been stockpiling semiconductors and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these highly sought-after chips.
To sustain his participation in such an expensive AI race, Zhipu keeps his coffers full by raising money from local investors. The $340 million investment came from yuan funds, marking a shift from a two-decade trend in which dollar funds were the preferred source of financing until geopolitical tensions created a technology divide.
In August, President Joe Biden signed a executive order banning US investments in China's critical technology sectors, including artificial intelligence, semiconductors and quantum computing. The goal is to stop China's military buildup, but the order also sent shivers down the spines. venture capitalists China-focused Americans, who are now avoiding investments in sensitive areas. Some have opted for a solution to continue operating in the market by separating their units in China, such as Sequoia Capital China, which was renamed HongShan, and GGV Capital.
HongShan, along with other prominent venture capitalists such as Shunwei Capital and Hillhouse Capital, as well as a state-owned fund managed by Legend Capital, invested in Zhipu.
The AI startup also raised capital from an impressive list of Chinese internet giants, uniting even archrivals like Alibaba and Tencent, which rarely invest together. The lineup includes Ant Group, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Meituan, Kingsoft, TAL Education Group and Boss Zhipin.
Zhipu recently open-sourced its bilingual (Chinese and English) conversational AI model ChatGLM-6B, which is trained on six billion parameters and claims to be able to perform inference on a single consumer graphics card. also has a basic open source model trained on 130 billion parameters, the GLM-130B.
