China’s artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem is expanding independently from the United States, with major companies working on both sides.
In response to US AI goliaths OpenAI and Anthropic, China’s AI sector is developing their technology, and among its leading players, Zhipu AI, a company that creates foundation models, made notable news today by stating that it has successfully received 2.5 billion yuan (about $340 million) in investment this year, as reported by TechCrunch.
Zhipu AI was established in 2019 by Tang Jie, a well-known employee of the university’s Department of Computer Science and Technology. He is a Tsinghua University graduate, a prominent institution.
Zhipu AI is obtaining funding from regional investors to maintain its competitive advantage in this expensive AI race. Yuan-denominated money made up the $340 million investment, deviating from the usual preference for USD funds as the source of capital. Growing geopolitical tensions and the resulting digital gap are to blame for this transformation.
US Imposed Further Chip Restrictions
The timing of the announcent is crucial for the development of AI technology as new restrictions on the sale of Nvidia AI hardware by the Biden administration have recently hampered China’s ability to train broad language models. Chinese AI businesses with significant financial resources have been stockpiling semiconductor supplies in anticipation of potential US semiconductor restrictions, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these highly sought-after chips.
US President Joe Biden issued an executive order in August limiting American investment in key Chinese innovation industries, including AI, semiconductors, and quantum computing. While slowing China’s military development is the main goal, this measure has also caused US venture capitalists with a focus on China to avoid making investments in delicate sectors, per Reuters.
In response to the new chip restrictions, China blasted the Biden administration, saying that the measure “violates the principles of the market economy and fair competition,” according to a BBC report.
Some companies have opted to restructure their China operations, with Sequoia Capital China changing its name to HongShan and GGV Capital following suit.
China’s AI Sector Working Together
Notably, Zhipu AI has received investments from HongShan, notable venture capital firms including Shunwei Capital and Hillhouse Capital, as well as a state fund run by Legend Capital.
Zhipu AI has obtained funding from a prestigious group of Chinese internet goliaths in a surprising display of unity, bringing together even bitter competitors like Alibaba and Tencent, who seldom collaborate on investments. Ant Group, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Meituan, Kingsoft, TAL Education Group, and Boss Zhipin are just a few of the illustrious names on this list.
Recent advancements by Zhipu AI include the open-sourcing of ChatGLM-6B, a multilingual conversational AI model that was developed using an incredible six billion training parameters. This approach has the capacity to execute inferences on a single graphics card made for common use.
In addition, Zhipu AI has unveiled the GLM-130B open-sourced foundation model, which was trained on an astounding 130 billion parameters.
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