In December 2022, the launch of ChatGPT 3.5 sparked a global interest in large-scale AI. Major Chinese companies like Baidu, Alibaba and SenseTime followed suit in 2023. By June, China’s AI landscape had seen a flurry general-purpose models and specialized models. By 2023, more than 300 large models were released, leading to the “Hundred-Model Battle” that was dubbed by the media. As of 2024 the so-called “Six Tigers”namely Zhipu AI (MiniMax), Baichuan AI (Moonshot), StepFun (StepFun), and 01.AI, are dominating the field. According to Chinese media outlet Caixin, four of these companies have valuations exceeding 20 billion RMB ($2.7billion). These companies also carry the expectation of becoming China’s OpenAI.
Zhipu AI
Zhipu AI was founded in June 2019. It is one of only a few companies in China to have existed before the launch of ChatGPT. Zhipu AI is a major player within the sector as it was one of the first to explore large language model. The company’s management team includes notable figures from China’s top academic institutions. CEO Zhang Peng is a graduate of Tsinghua University’s Computer Science Department. He is joined by Chief Science Tang Jie, who holds a Tsinghua University professorship, and President Wang Shaolan. Both hold Tsinghua Innovation Leadership doctorates. In April 2024, the company expanded its leadership team with the addition of former Alibaba Cloud Vice-President Chen Xuesong as Vice-President.
GLM-4.0 is an open-source, end-to-end large language model that was released in October 2024. It allows users to customize the tone, emotion or dialect to suit their preferences. Zhipu also launched a variety of other large models including general-purpose models in different sizes, CodeGeeX, based on Huawei’s MindSpore framework; the CogView text to image model; and the VisualGLM dialogue model. The GLM technology team announced plans to enter inference models on December 31, 2024.
Investors have favored Zhipu AI on the financial front. In 2023, Zhipu AI completed a RMB 2,5 billion ($350 million), funding round with the participation of major investors, including the Social Security Fund’s Zhongguancun Innovation Fund. Other participants included Meituan Ant Group, Alibaba Tencent Xiaomi, Sequoia Capital and Hillhouse Capital. The company also secured RMB 3 billion ($420 millions) in funding before the end of 2024, which will further boost its financial standing.
MiniMax
MiniMax was founded two years after ZhiPu. Yan Junjie spent more than a decade researching and developing AI before founding MiniMax. Yan Junjie, the company’s founder, shared his vision for the company, Intelligence with Everyone. He also revealed key data about users: 3 billion AI interactions per day and 30 trillion tokens. MiniMax launched Glow in October 2022. The app quickly gained popularity, and within four months, had over 5 million users. The app was rebranded to Xingye in China and Talkie internationally, marking MiniMax’s expansion into international markets.
Hailuo AI is another standout product. This video-generator quickly gained international attention, and video creators gave positive reviews. Alibaba led a $600-million funding round for Minimax in March 2024.
Baichuan Intelligence
Baichuan Intelligence, a team of AI experts from leading tech companies, such as Sogou Baidu Huawei Microsoft ByteDance and Tencent, was founded in March 2023. Baichuan Intelligence, founded less than 100 days ago, released two open-source commercially useful Chinese language models: Baichuan-7B, and Baichuan-13B.
In July 2024 the Chinese media outlet 36kr announced that Baichuan Intelligence had completed a Series-A funding round, raising 5 billion yuan. Baichuan announced its A1 round of funding in October 2023. The list of investors included tech giants Alibaba and Tencent as well as several top-tier firms.
Moonshot
Moonshot is also founded in March of 2023 and is led by Professor Yang Zhilin of Tsinghua University’s School of Interdisciplinary Information. The team includes talent that comes from global tech giants like Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. Kimi Chat is more focused on the long-text capabilities than some of the other large models on the market. It can, for example, support a context with approximately 200,000 Chinese symbols–2.5x the size of Anthropic’s Claude-100k which supports around 80.000 words and 8x that of OpenAI’s GPT-4-32000 (which supports about 25,000 words). This potential has contributed towards Moonshot’s $3 billion valuation.
Recent legal disputes have overshadowed its success.
StepFun
StepFun, the latest company in the “Six Little Tigers”is the newest company to make its official debut. Many people first heard of Jieyue in March of this year. However, the company quickly rose in the large-model sector to become a leader. The company’s multimodal technology has attracted the attention of many developers. Statistics show that Jieyue Xingchen launched 11 foundational models in the last 10 months. These include language models, multimodal models of understanding, video generation models and speech models.
01.AI
Kai-Fu Lee founded 01.AI in July 2023. He held key positions with tech giants like Apple, Silicon Graphics and Microsoft. 01.AI launched its two models, Yi-Lightning & Yi-Large, in the first three-quarters of this year. Both models were ranked as the top-ranking large models in the domestic market on LMSYS. The core advantage of 01.AI is not in the rankings but in the pre-training costs. The training and deployment costs under the model cobuilding strategy are impressively low. Founder Kai-Fu Lee said that Yi-Lightning training took only one and a quarter months and required 2,000 GPUs. The costs were around 2% less than Musk’s xAI.
Media reports from August 7, 2024 revealed that 01.AI completed a new round of funding, raising several hundreds million dollars. Investors included an international strategic investors and several Southeast Asian Consortiums. 01.AI is yet to comment on this funding news. 01.AI received an investment from Alibaba Cloud before this round. The company’s valuation then surpassed $1 billion and it was deemed a unicorn.
