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Z.ai

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Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology Co., Ltd.
Z.ai
Native name
北京智谱华章科技有限公司
Company typePrivate
IndustryArtificial intelligence
Founded2019; 6 years ago (2019)
Founders
  • Tang Jie
  • Li Juanzi
HeadquartersBeijing, China
Key people
  • Zhang Peng (CEO)
ProductsGLM-4.6
Number of employees
800+ (2024)
Website

Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology Co., Ltd.,[a] branded as Z.ai, is a Chinese technology company specializing in artificial intelligence (AI). The company was formerly known as Zhipu AI until its rebranding in 2025.[1][2]

As of 2024, it is one of China's "AI Tiger" companies by investors and considered to be the third largest LLM market player in China's AI industry according to the International Data Corporation.[3] In January 2025, the United States Commerce Department blacklisted the company in its Entity List due to national security concerns.[4]

History

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Company logo from 2019 to 2025

The startup company began from Tsinghua University and was later spun out as an independent company.[5]

In 2023, it raised 2.5 billion yuan (approx. 350 million in USD) with the help of Alibaba Group and Tencent.[6][7][8] Other investors of the company include Ant Group, Meituan, Xiaomi, and HongShan.[7]

In May 2024, Prosperity7 Ventures, LLC, a Saudi Arabian finance firm, participated in a 400 million USD financing round for Zhipu AI with a valuation of approximately 3 billion USD.[9]

In March 2024, Zhipu AI said that they were developing a Sora-like technology to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI).[10] In July 2024, they debuted their "Ying" text-to-video model.[11]

After OpenAI announced an API block for their services in some areas beginning in July 2024, Zhipu AI have announced a "Special Migration Program" for OpenAI API users.[12]

In October 2024, Zhipu AI released GLM-4.0, an open-source end-to-end speech large language model. The model can replicate human-like interactions and has the capability to adjust its tone, emotion, or dialect based from user's preference.[13]

In July 2025, Zhipu AI released GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air, their next generation language models which topped several popular benchmarks.[14] Along with the release of their model, the company also rebranded itself as Z.ai.[1][2] In August 2025, Z.ai announced that their GLM models are compatible with Huawei’s Ascend processors.[2] On August 11, 2025, Z.ai released a new vision-language model (VLM) with a total of 106B parameters, GLM-4.5V, achieving SOTA against other open-source VLMs such as Alibaba's Qwen2.5-VL and StepFun's Step-3.[15][16] In late September 2025, the company released GLM 4.6 using China's domestic chips such as those from Cambricon Technologies.[17][18]

Products and services

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GLM

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GLM (General Language Model, formerly known as ChatGLM) is a series of pre-trained dialogue models initially developed by Zhipu AI and Tsinghua KEG in 2023. According to NVIDIA, their open-source ChatGLM3-6B in the ChatGLM 3.0 series described it as having "smooth dialogue and easy deployment" compared to the first two generations.[19]

GLM 4.5, released in July 2025 by Z.ai, is priced at 13% of DeepSeek's cost and can run at only eight NVIDIA H20 chips.[20] The release of GLM 4.6 in late September 2025 marked the first integration of FP8 and Int4 quantization on Cambricon chips. It also supports native FP8 on Moore Threads GPUs.[17][18]

Ying

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Debuted in July 2024, Ying is a text-to-video model that can generate image and text prompts into a six-second video clip for around 30 seconds. The service is available at their official website and mobile applications integrated with their ChatGLM chatbot.[11]

AutoGLM

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Released in October 2024, AutoGLM is an AI agent application that uses voice commands to complete tasks within a smartphone. The app can analyze complex tasks such as ordering an item from a nearby store and repeating an order based from the user's shopping history. The app was made as a rival to Apple's on-device AI system, Apple Intelligence.[21]

The AI tool runs on a series of AI models and chatbots, such as their ChatGLM chatbot, to process the required actions.[21]

International presence

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The company has offices in the Middle East, United Kingdom, Singapore, and Malaysia. It is also engaged in joint "innovation center" projects across Southeast Asia. In January 2025, the United States Commerce Department added the company to its Entity List, citing national security concerns.[4]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b Cheng, Evelyn (28 July 2025). "China's latest AI model claims to be even cheaper to use than DeepSeek". CNBC. Retrieved 19 August 2025.
  2. ^ a b c "Unicorn Z.ai adapts models for Huawei chips to broaden China's AI ecosystem". South China Morning Post. 9 August 2025. Retrieved 19 August 2025.
  3. ^ "Baidu, SenseTime lead China's market for business-focused LLMs, says IDC". South China Morning Post. 22 August 2024. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  4. ^ a b Butts, Dylan (26 June 2025). "Blacklisted by the U.S. and backed by Beijing, this Chinese AI startup has caught OpenAI's attention". CNBC. Retrieved 13 September 2025.
  5. ^ "China's AI startups race for customers as titans like Alibaba cut prices". Nikkei Asia. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  6. ^ Kharpal, Arjun (20 October 2023). "Alibaba, Tencent among investors in China's rival to OpenAI with million funding". CNBC. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  7. ^ a b "Alibaba and Tencent lead US million total investment this year in Zhipu AI". South China Morning Post. 20 October 2023. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  8. ^ "Alibaba, Tencent Join Big Backers for Chinese AI Startup Zhipu". Bloomberg.com. 20 October 2023. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  9. ^ "Saudi Fund Joins Million Financing for China AI Firm Zhipu". Bloomberg.com. 31 May 2024. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  10. ^ "Zhipu AI says it is developing Sora-like technology as a path to AGI". South China Morning Post. 16 March 2024. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  11. ^ a b "Zhipu AI launches video model as more Chinese tech firms take on OpenAI's Sora". South China Morning Post. 27 July 2024. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  12. ^ "Chinese AI firms woo OpenAI users as U.S. company plans API restrictions". CNBC. 25 June 2024. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  13. ^ Razzaq, Asif (25 October 2024). "Zhipu AI Releases GLM-4-Voice: A New Open-Source End-to-End Speech Large Language Model". MarkTechPost. Retrieved 2 November 2024.
  14. ^ "GLM-4.5: Reasoning, Coding, and Agentic Abilities". 28 July 2025. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  15. ^ "zai-org/GLM-4.5V · Hugging Face". huggingface.co. 18 August 2025. Retrieved 25 August 2025.
  16. ^ "GLM-4.5V". Z.AI API DOC. Retrieved 25 August 2025.
  17. ^ a b Chang, Vicky (6 October 2025). "China Recap | The nation's AI drive". KrASIA. Retrieved 9 October 2025.
  18. ^ a b "智谱发布新一代大模型GLM-4.6，寒武纪、摩尔线程已适配-36氪". 36kr.com. 9 October 2025. Retrieved 9 October 2025.
  19. ^ "ChatGLM — NVIDIA NeMo Framework User Guide latest documentation". docs.nvidia.com. Retrieved 2 November 2024.
  20. ^ Ginn, Aaron. "China's Z.ai and America's Self-Defeating AI Strategy". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 19 August 2025.
  21. ^ a b "China's Zhipu AI says its app can operate your smartphone for you". South China Morning Post. 30 October 2024. Retrieved 2 November 2024.

Notes

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  1. ^ Chinese: 北京智谱华章科技有限公司
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