Four Chinese generative artificial intelligence start-ups have been valued at between $1.2bn and $2.5bn in the past three months, leading a pack of more than 260 companies vying to emulate the success of US rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The newly minted unicorns — Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and 01.ai — have gained significant backing from a largely domestic pool of investors and are fighting to hire the best talent to develop the most popular AI products. “There is no winner of foundation models yet in the China market. These are some of the names leading the charge to claim that title,” said Charlie Dai, vice-president and principal analyst at tech-focused consultancy Forrester. US counterparts outrank Chinese generative AI start-ups in terms of technological development and total fundraising. But with ChatGPT and other breakout AI applications like Character.ai unavailable in China, 262 start-ups are competing to bring out homegrown alternatives, according to a tally by data provider IT Juzi. Overall, China’s generative AI start-ups have disclosed a fundraising total of Rmb14.3bn ($2bn) in the first four months of the year, according to IT Juzi, defying a chill in investment running through other areas of consumer technology. However, many start-ups have not disclosed all their fundraising rounds, shielding their war chests from competitors in the rush to hire talent and compete for limited computing resources.

Full report : A look at Chinese generative AI startups Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, and 01.ai, which have all been valued between $1.2B and $2.5B in the past three months.