Asia Tech Wire (Nov 7) -- Meituan co-founder and former Meituan senior vice president Wang Huiwen has returned to lead a team exploring AI applications at Meituan, according to Chinese media outlet 36Kr.
The Chinese media outlet cited sources as saying that Wang's AI team is known as GN06 at Meituan, and its main business directions include emotional companionship and chatbots.
A person close to Meituan said GN06 is directly supervised by Wang and does not belong to any business group.
This person said that GN06 is relatively independent of Meituan, focusing on exploring directions outside the main business, also independent of Meituan's existing big model team and the AI team in each business line.
One of GN06's main products is Wow, an AI emotional companion product that Meituan launched in November 2023.
Wow is the first independent product of Meituan in the AI application track, and users can freely customize the character image, personality and timbre to interact in the AI community.
Another person familiar with the matter said there has been a rapid increase in hiring demand for GN06 since this summer.
The person said today Wow is focusing on going overseas and betting on the North American market.
A collegemate of Meituan founder Wang Xing, Wang Huiwen joined the Chinese food delivery giant in December 2010, retired in January 2020, during which time he founded artificial general intelligence (AGI) company Light Year in 2018 .
In February 2023, in the midst of a wave of AI startups sparked by ChatGPT, Wang announced a personal contribution of $50 million to recruit talent in an attempt to create a Chinese version of OpenAI.
And in June 2023, Wang applied for resignation as a director of Meituan for personal health reasons. Sources familiar with the matter said at the time that he had temporarily left work and was in the hospital, but the exact cause of his illness was not known.
Just this June, Meituan announced that it had pay a total consideration of $281 million to acquire Light Year.
Meituan CEO Wang Xing sent an internal email in April this year, saying that Wang Huiwen was gradually recovering his health and would spend part of his time as a consultant for Meituan.
