Meituan’s AI Initiatives: Large‑Scale Scheduling, Unmanned Delivery, and the Meituan Brain Knowledge Graph

Meituan, one of China’s largest online local‑life platforms, has been investing heavily in artificial intelligence to improve its services. The company’s AI team now exceeds 1,000 engineers and has a quarterly R&D budget of about 2 billion CNY.

Meituan AI Overview

The AI team works on speech, vision, natural language processing, machine learning, and knowledge graphs. Core applications include search and recommendation in the Meituan/Dianping apps, delivery‑dispatch strategies, pricing systems, autonomous delivery, voice recognition in smart earphones, facial recognition, and merchant‑side financial and supply‑chain services.

For Meituan’s food‑delivery business, the platform processes roughly 20 million orders per day and must dispatch over 500 k riders within 30 minutes during peak hours. To meet this challenge, the delivery‑algorithm team built a real‑time, multi‑person, multi‑point scheduling system that performs about 2.9 billion route‑calculations per hour at peak times.

Talent Recruitment for Applied AI

Meituan’s AI projects attract top talent from leading universities (Tsinghua, Peking, CMU, UCSD) and major tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, Baidu). Over 1,000 AI algorithm engineers (including interns) are employed, and the company co‑hosts the global AI Challenger competition covering autonomous‑driving perception and fine‑grained sentiment analysis.

Unmanned Delivery Exploration

The unmanned‑delivery team has built the world’s largest, most complex real‑time dispatch system. The platform has been tested in multiple cities (e.g., Xiong’an, Shenzhen) and opened an open‑platform in July 2018, partnering with universities and companies such as UC Berkeley and Segway.

Unmanned delivery requires expertise in perception, localization, mapping, planning, control, embedded systems, hardware integration, big‑data storage, and cloud simulation, as well as coordination with property managers and local governments.

Building a Large‑Scale Knowledge Graph – “Meituan Brain”

Since May 2018, the NLP center has constructed a massive knowledge graph covering 23 concept types, 1.6 billion entities, and 48.6 billion triples, rivaling Google’s Knowledge Graph and Microsoft’s Satori. The graph powers search, finance, merchant operations, and SaaS cash‑register solutions, providing interpretable AI insights for both users and merchants.

The graph is built using a combination of deep‑learning‑based knowledge extraction and traditional graph‑based reasoning, and the team is developing a distributed graph engine capable of real‑time queries on a trillion‑scale graph.

Business‑Oriented AI Platform

Meituan’s AI Platform (under the AI Platform Department of the Basic R&D Platform) supplies AI capabilities—speech, vision, NLP, machine learning, user profiling—to all business units. The platform relies on a GPU cluster of several thousand cards and a data lake of hundreds of petabytes.

AI Future: Patience and Long‑Term Commitment

Company leaders emphasize a “customer‑centric” and “long‑term patience” mindset. While AI is still in an early, “weak” stage, Meituan continues to invest in data, compute, and algorithmic research to gradually solve real‑world problems across its massive ecosystem.