Online Q&A Platform Zhihu Releases Large-scale Model

On April 13, Zhihu, a Chinese Q&A community, announced the release of “Zhihaitu AI”, a large-scale model co-trained with Model Best, one of China’s leading model makers. Additionally, Zhihu has invested in Model Best to further strengthen their partnership.

Zhihu founder, chairman, and CEO Victor Zhou recalled a product feature called ‘Answer Summary’ that was introduced 10 years ago. The platform allowed creators to use this feature for summarizing answers. However, due to the increasing amount of content on the platform, the cost and difficulty of summarization became high which led to a suspension of this function. Now with technological progress, Zhihu is pleased to reintroduce this feature again.

During the conference, Zeng Guoyang, Co-founder of Model Best, announced that they are collaborating with Zhihu to explore the application of large model capabilities using “Zhihaitu AI”. The aim is to quickly extract elements from all answers in Zhihu‘s question list and present a summary of viewpoints to users. This will enable everyone to comprehend the focus of the discussion more comprehensively and efficiently.

Zeng reported that, following testing on Zhihu, the large model is comparable to GPT-4. The Model Best was founded in 2022 and includes a Chinese language model called CPM-Bee. The founding team comprises members solely from the Natural Language Processing and Social Humanities Computing Laboratory at Tsinghua University.

According to a report from Leiphone, Model Best and DeepLang AI are new players in the large-scale model industry. Both companies have caught the attention of Wang Huiwen, co-founder of Meituan, who is currently recruiting talent for his new AI startup. However, Model Best ultimately decided to develop independently.

Recently, Zhihu published its unaudited financial report for the fourth quarter and full year of 2022. During Q4, both Zhihu‘s advertising and content commercialization solutions experienced a decline in revenue compared to the same period of the previous year. The advertising business was hit hardest with a single-quarter revenue drop of over 27% YoY, while revenue from content commercialization solutions decreased by 18.9%.

SEE ALSO: Chinese Q&A Platform Zhihu Begins Layoffs

During the performance conference after the financial report was released, Zhihu CTO Li Dahai discussed large models and AI-generated content (AIGC). He mentioned that they have conducted a thorough evaluation of their self-developed AIGC technology and collaborated with external partners. They are also using open APIs to enhance products and support creators.