BEIJING, June 23 (TMTPost)— Alibaba Group’s fintech affiliate Ant Group confirms recent news about its efforts for artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Source: Visual China

A technology and development team at Ant Group is developing its own multimodal large language model (LLM), internally called Zhenyi, Reuters cited a spokesman of the company. Ant Group responded that recent reports about LLM are true, according to Chinese news media outlets The Paper and Jiemian. Jiemian also learned the model was dubbed Zhenyi by Ant employees. Chinese netizens speculated the name Zhenyi was inspired from Wang Zhenyi, a famous female scientist from the Qing Dynasty. Wang was well known for notable works on astronomy and mathematics, including Explanation of Lunar Eclipses, The Explanation of the Pythagorean Theorem and Trigonometry, Dispute of the Precessions of the Equinoxes and Theory of the Round Earth.

LLM is the AI technology that empowers ChatGPT, the most popular AI chatbot developed by OpenAi since late 2022. Ant Group’s move seems to seek to deploy in-house research for ChatGPT-style service. It became the latest Chinese tech stars to join the heated AI race, attempting to compete with Silicon Valley giants like Google and Microsoft as well as Baidu and other domestic peers.

News about Ant Group’s work on LLM came days after Beijing Shengshu Technology Co., Ltd.,(Shengshu Technology) completed its angel round of funding of nearly RMB100 million, led by Ant. Shengshu Technology, established in March, was incubated by Ant, RealAI, an AI solution provider, and BV, a venture capital initiated by Baidu. The AI startup is under the leadership of Tang Jiayu, former vice president at RealAI, as CEO. Its core members mainly come from Institute for AI Industry Research, Tsinghua University.

Besides investments in startups founded or backed by talents from Tsinghua University, Ant Group also seeks to create partnership with universities and colleges, which is one of its major ways for scientific research. It signed a cooperation agreement with Tsinghua University in April. Under the agreement, two parties will initially work on two key fields: trustworthy AI and safe large-scale general purpose AI model.

Ant data showed it ramp up input in scientific research even its initial public offering (IPO) plan was suspended in 2020. The Chinese financial company invested RMB20.46 billion in research and development (R&D) in 2022, doubling its annual spending on such efforts in 2019. Its research focuses on five areas, including distributed database and computing infrastructure, blockchain, privacy computing, data and network security and AI.