By Kate Yuan

(JW Insights) Oct 10 -- China's Zhizi Yinqing (智子引擎), a multimodal large model startup, announced setting up its headquarter in Nanjing of eastern China’s Jiangsu Province on October 9.

Founded in 2021, Zhizi Yinqing focuses on the next-generation artificial intelligence underlying engines and multimodal large models. The company is one of the early teams in China to conduct research on multimodal large models, which still remain largely unexplored territory compared to the promising developments of large language models.

Leveraging the technical expertise of the Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence at Renmin University of China, the company launched the multimodal large model WenLan BriVL and has since iterated it to version 2.0 in March 2021. In March 2023, it released a multimodal dialogue application ChatImg with a parameter scale of 15 billion.

Zhizi Yinqing also plans to release the ChatImg Ascend version within the year and continue to evolve based on the Ascend technology roadmap.

After completing this project, the company will build an ecosystem application center, a computing power center, and a large model joint laboratory with Renmin University of China.

On August 24, the company announced completing tens of millions of RMB angel+ round of financing, led by a fund under CICC Capital and another leading investment institution. Prior to this, it had raised tens of millions of RMB in the angel round of financing on May 22 of this year.