Zhipu AI, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) research lab, has raised $340 million in a Series A round led by some of the country's tech giants, such as Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, and Meituan. The funding will help Zhipu AI pursue its ambitious goal of creating artificial general intelligence (AGI), a type of AI that can surpass human intelligence and perform any task. Zhipu AI is often compared to OpenAI, the US-based research organization that is backed by some of the biggest names in tech, such as Elon Musk, Microsoft, and Facebook.
Zhipu AI's origin and vision
Zhipu AI was founded in 2021 by a group of former Baidu researchers who left the Chinese search giant after it disbanded its AI lab. Zhipu AI claims to have more than 200 researchers and engineers who are working on various AI domains, such as natural language processing, computer vision, reinforcement learning, and robotics.
Zhipu AI aims to create an AI system that can learn from any data source and perform any task, similar to OpenAI's vision of AGI. Zhipu AI also plans to build a supercomputer that can rival OpenAI's GPT-3, the world's largest and most powerful language model. GPT-3 can generate coherent and diverse texts on almost any topic and has been used for various applications, such as chatbots, content creation, and code generation.
Zhipu AI's co-founder and CEO, Liang Junbin, said that the company's goal is to make AI more accessible and beneficial for everyone. He said that Zhipu AI wants to collaborate with other researchers and developers in the AI community and share its resources and findings with the public.
Zhipu AI's products and applications
Zhipu AI has already launched several products based on its AI models, such as a chatbot platform, a content generation platform, and a smart assistant platform. These products are designed to help businesses and individuals improve their productivity, creativity, and communication.
For example, Zhipu AI's chatbot platform allows users to create customized chatbots for various scenarios, such as customer service, e-commerce, education, and entertainment. Zhipu AI's content generation platform enables users to generate high-quality texts for different purposes, such as marketing, journalism, blogging, and social media. Zhipu AI's smart assistant platform provides users with intelligent assistants that can help them with tasks like scheduling, booking, travel planning, and information retrieval.
Zhipu AI's products have attracted many customers and partners from different industries and sectors, such as media, education, health care, finance, and entertainment. Some of the notable names include Xinhua News Agency, China Central Television, Tsinghua University, Peking University, Ping An Insurance, and iQiyi.