---
title: "Zhizi Engine Raises ¥10M Angel for Multimodal LLM — Yuan Chengxiang ChatImg"
author: "Unique Research"
sourcePublication: "Unique Research (FFCAP English library)"
originalPublishedAt: "2023-06-02T17:59:31+08:00"
canonical: "https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20230602a08cof00"
source: "https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20230602a08cof00"
language: "en"
cnSourceUrl: "https://view.inews.qq.com/a/20230602A08COF00"
---

# Zhizi Engine Raises ¥10M Angel for Multimodal LLM — Yuan Chengxiang ChatImg

_Unique Research · Company / funding · June 2, 2023_

On **May 22, 2023**, multimodal LLM developer **Zhizi Engine (智子引擎)** closed a **¥10M** angel round. CEO **Gao Yizhao** is a Renmin University PhD under advisor **Lu Zhiwu** (also Softcom Power chief AI scientist and Zhizi advisor).

Lu and Gao have worked multimodal LMs since **2020**. Before ChatGPT, BAAI’s **Wudao** gathered four forces (Tsinghua Tang Jie / Liu Zhiyuan / Huang Minlie + Renmin Wen Jirong). Wen’s Gaoling AI lab led multimodal “**Wenlan**”; Lu was a core modeller, Gao on data/train/eval. After Wudao, Tang/Liu/Huang spun out companies — Renmin’s entry completed the “four kings” entrepreneurship arc. Lu’s team was among China’s earliest multimodal LM groups with strong results.

**Product:** application-grade multimodal ChatGPT “**Yuan Chengxiang ChatImg**” (Mar 8, 2023) — ~tens-of-billions parameters; trained on image–text pairs + VQA for match/retrieval/caption/text-gen. Input image or text → chat, stories, ads. Wenlan 2.0 (BriVL-2, Jun 2021): weak image–text correlation assumption + DeepSpeed multimodal train; 6.5B weakly correlated pairs → **5B** params — then largest Chinese general image–text pretrained model.

**Strategy:** general multimodal generative model “Yuan Chengxiang” — multimodal in/out. ChatImg is the dialog slice; team already has text-to-image, text-to-video, multimodal search to fold in. ChatImg 2.0 launch with Softcom Power / Softcom Wisdom / Fujian AI Computing Center for industrial landing.

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Editorial English edition published on UniqueCapital: https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20230602a08cof00
On-site reading page: https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20230602a08cof00