Chinese artificial intelligence startup ModelBest Inc announced on Thursday a new round of financing totaling several hundreds of million yuan, as the company strives to promote efficient large models with fewer parameters amid the boom driven by ChatGPT from the United States.

The latest financing was led by Primavera Venture Partners and Habo, an investment firm of Huawei technologies. Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund and knowledge-sharing platform Zhihu was also among investors.

According to the company, the new funds will be used to further recruit outstanding talents, strengthen the underlying computing power and data foundation for the development of large models.

It will also be used to drive the effective training and application of the company's large models, it said.

On Thursday, the company also launched its next generation light-weighted large model. The new MiniCPM large model is able to drive applications with higher efficiency at lower cost.