On April 11, Facewall Intelligence announced the completion of a new round of financing of hundreds of millions of yuan, and Zhihu will continue to follow up the investment as a strategic shareholder. After the completion of this round of financing, Face Wall Intelligence will further promote the introduction of outstanding talents, strengthen the underlying computing power and data foundation for big model development, and promote efficient training and rapid implementation of big models. There is no shortage of well-known capital and industrial investments in the new round of investors, including Chunhua Venture Capital, Huawei Hubble, and the Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund.
Face Wall Intelligence is a top domestic model team. The founding members are all from the NLP laboratory at Tsinghua University and have deep experience in the field of big models. As recognized as the best Chinese corpus in the industry, Zhihu is not only an important early investor in face wall intelligence, but also a strategic partner in team building and large model development. In addition to Zhihu, Faceface has joined hands with partners such as China Merchants Bank and Mathematical Network Maintenance to deploy big models and agent technology in application scenarios such as finance, education, government affairs, and smart terminals.
In 2023, Zhihu strategically invested in Face Wall Intelligence. The two sides began an in-depth model co-construction process, and in April of the same year, the first major Chinese model “Zhihaitu AI” was launched. Over the course of a year, “Zhihaitu AI” has been actively used in various business scenarios of Zhihu. In March of this year, Zhihu launched a new community-native AI function “Discovery · AI Search” based on “Zhihaitu AI”, bringing users a new experience integrating search, real-time Q&A, and question-tracking functions.
The development of the big model industry depends on the three major productivity factors of scenario, technology, and data. As a high-quality Q&A community, Zhihu has natural application scenarios and data advantages, providing strong resource support for large-scale model training and application implementation. Zhou Yuan, founder and CEO of Zhihu, said, “Zhihu's strategic cooperation with FaceWall Intelligence in the field of model development will help further shorten the cycle at the model technology level and achieve comprehensive progress in model development and application implementation. We believe that AI is an expansion of human capabilities and will surely serve and empower people. We hope to enhance the convenience and usefulness of the community and further expand the boundaries of the community through the development and application of large models.”