China's Top Tech Giants Back OpenAI Rival Zhipu With $341 Million

Zhipu AI secures further backing from heavyweight Chinese investors amid investment rules in the U.S..

Chinese AI start-up Zhipu has raised over 2.5 billion Chinese yuan ($341 million) this year with backing from technology giants such as Xiaomi, Alibaba, and Tencent, being touted as a national answer to American firm OpenAI.
Zhipu, originating from Tsinghua University, is developing AI models trained on large amounts of data useful for various applications, and in August released a generative AI chatbot based on these models.
The funding for Zhipu signifies a shift from the previous two-decade trend where USD funds were the preferred source of financing for Chinese AI companies - a change spurring from geopolitical tensions between U.S. and China.
The Biden administration recently imposed additional restrictions on the export of Nvidia AI chips, crucial for training AI models, to China, further intensifying the technology battle between the two nations.
Zhipu has also opened a bilingual (Chinese and English) conversational AI model ChatGLM-6B to the public, which is trained on six billion parameters, with a claim of performing inferences on a single consumer-grade graphics card.