In the world of artificial intelligence (AI), a new player is emerging that is competing with established players such as OpenAI. Zhipu AI, a Chinese company, has made impressive progress in AI research in a short period of time and is positioning itself as a serious competitor in this field.
The emergence of Zhipu AI
Zhipu AI can trace its origins to the computer science department of the renowned Tsinghua University in China. Zhipu AI’s technology was first introduced to the public in 2022 with the launch of the Zhipu MaaS open platform. This platform offers a wide range of algorithmic services based on fundamental models. As a Large Language Model (LLM), it is a powerful generative AI language model. Such models, such as ChatGPT, are capable of understanding, processing and generating natural language, making them an important part of text-based AI applications.
Model as a Service (MaaS): The future of AI
The abbreviation “MaaS” stands for “Model as a Service”. It represents a cloud-based approach that provides developers and companies with pre-trained machine learning models. This greatly simplifies the integration of AI capabilities into applications and allows companies to focus their resources on solving real-world problems rather than building and training AI models from scratch.
New models and impressive funding from Zhipu AI
This year, Zhipu AI not only launched the ChatGLM-6B conversation model, but also a beta version of the ChatGLM conversation model with an impressive 130 billion parameters, enabling questions and answers, multiple rounds of dialogue, and even code generation.
Zhipu AI’s funding is also impressive. The Chinese AI startup raised over 2.5 billion Chinese yuan (US$341 million) this year alone. The company’s backers include some of China’s biggest tech giants, including Alibaba and Tencent. Venture capitalists like Sequoia and Hillhouse have also made significant contributions. As the technological competition between the US and China continues to escalate, Zhipu AI’s involvement in this area becomes increasingly important.
The AI competition and China’s vision
China views artificial intelligence as a key technology that should be developed specifically. Because it has the potential to strengthen the country’s economic performance. The country has ambitious plans to increase computing power by 50 percent by 2025. This would further boost the development of AI applications.
Nevertheless, the US is trying to make it more difficult for China to access crucial technologies for developing AI models. Last year, regulations were introduced that restricted sales of top-end graphics processors like NVIDIA’s A100 and H100 to China. These regulations were further tightened this month to cover a broader range of NVIDIA chips.
However, Zhipu AI is not the only Chinese startup looking to boost the AI industry. Many such companies receive support from the country’s technology giants. Another AI startup called Baichuan recently announced that it has raised around $300 million from investors including Alibaba and Tencent. At the same time, tech giants such as Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu are developing their own AI models and launching products based on this technology. China remains a significant player in the global race for AI supremacy.
