Beijing-based Zhihu Zhang Technology Co., Ltd. recently announced it has secured over 1 billion RMB (approximately €130 million) in a new strategic funding round. Participants in this round include Hangzhou Chengtou Industry Fund and Shangcheng Capital, among others. This demonstrates strong market confidence and support for Zhihu.
As one of the first Chinese AI companies to embrace open-source large models, Zhihu aims to make 2025 a pivotal year for its open-source development. The company plans to launch a new series of large models this year, including base models, inference models, multimodal models, and agent models – all of which will be open-sourced. This move will not only accelerate the dissemination of AI technologies but also provide developers and businesses with more powerful tools, facilitating the implementation of various application scenarios.
Notably, on December 26th last year, Zhihu's technical team open-sourced the base model CogAgent-9B-20241220. This model is based on GLM-4V-9B and focuses on agent tasks. CogAgent-9B-20241220 was tested on multiple datasets and compared with other leading models like GPT-4o and Claude-3.5. Results show CogAgent achieved excellent performance across several datasets, demonstrating its strong capabilities in Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents.
Zhihu Zhang's new initiatives highlight not only the company's technological strength in the AI field but also invigorate open-source development. By releasing and open-sourcing these new large models, developers and businesses in the industry can more easily leverage these advanced AI technologies, enabling future innovations.
