(Yicai Global) June 21 -- Shengshu-AI has reportedly raised almost CNY100 million (USD14 million) in an angel fundraiser led by Ant Group, valuing the Chinese large language model startup at USD100 million.

Baidu Venture and Z&Y Capital also took part in the funding round, The Paper reported yesterday.

Shengshu-AI will mainly use the proceeds to build core research and development teams and accelerate the R&D of multimodal LLMs and application products, it added. A multimodal LLM combines multimodal information for training, including text, images, video, and audio.

“The long-term goal of artificial intelligence is to build multimodal neural networks, that is, AI can learn concepts from different modalities to better understand the world,” Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has said.

Shengshu-AI was set up in March by Ant, Baidu Venture, and RealAI, whose former vice president Tang Jiayu stepped in as chief executive officer of the Beijing-based LLM developer. 

Hangzhou-based Ant also confirmed today that it too is developing its own LLM called Zhenyi, according to media reports.

Editor: Martin Kadiev