Shanghai's Xuhui District launched its China International Import Expo (CIIE) Investment Promotion Season on Wednesday, inviting global businesses to invest in the downtown area following the conclusion of the 6th CIIE last Friday.

The initiative aims to build bridges between global enterprises and investors, welcoming top entrepreneurs and quality projects from around the world, the district government said.

It is part of Xuhui's global promotion campaign launched this year. Investment promotion events have been held in Singapore, Germany and Japan so far.

To extend the overseas efforts, Xuhui partnered with the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), and the Benelux Chamber of Commerce to establish the "Xuhui Service Station" on Wednesday.

The station will serve as a cooperation platform for both attracting and reaching out to global partners, the Xuhui government said.

Additionally, agreements on a new batch of 20 major projects were signed in Xuhui on Wednesday, covering sectors like marine science and technology, semiconductor research and development, large-scale scientific research, cultural media, insurance technology, and pharmaceuticals.

Among them, MiniMax Technology is a leader in establishing foundation models among domestic startups.

Liu Hua, public affairs manager at MiniMax, highlighted the district's artificial intelligence industry development and entrepreneurial environment as key factors in their decision to collaborate with Xuhui.

The company has developed "MiniMax-abab," a trilingual text, voice, and visual model, whose training data surpasses its major peer, the ChatGPT-3.5, and focuses primarily on Chinese content. It has served hundreds of clients across finance, entertainment, education, healthcare, smart hardware and the internet.

ChatGPT, or chat generative pre-trained transformer, is an large language model-based chatbot developed by OpenAI.

Xuhui has supported MiniMax's growth with employee residency, public housing, guidance for overseas talent policies, subsidies for operational and computational costs, assistance in enterprise qualification, service promotion, and ecosystem partner development, Liu pointed out.