# Zhipu AI 2024 Zhipu AI, rebranded as Z.ai, is a Chinese artificial intelligence company known for its GLM family of open-weight large language models, founded in 2019 as a Tsinghua University spin-off. Z.AI Co., Ltd., branded internationally as Z.ai, is a Chinese artificial intelligence company and the developer of the GLM (General Language Model) family of open-weight large language models. Formerly known as Zhipu AI outside China until 2025, it became China's first major LLM company to hold an initial public offering, listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January 2026. With a market capitalization of US$62 billion as of August 2026, it is the most valuable public AI pure play in China. Founded in Beijing in 2019 by Jie Tang as a Tsinghua University spin-out, the company's researchers introduced the first GLM version in May 2022, preceding the AI boom. Z.ai's models have been released under the free and open-source MIT License since July 2025; the company has also released vision language models, text-to-video models, and the ZCode AI coding harness. As of 2024, it is one of China's six "AI tiger" companies and is considered the third-largest LLM market player in China according to the International Data Corporation. In January 2025, the United States Commerce Department blacklisted the company on its Entity List due to national security concerns. Z.ai also owns AMiner, a research database similar to Google Scholar. ## Company Background The company's full name within China is 北京智谱华章科技有限公司, Běijīng Zhìpǔ Huázhāng Kējì Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī, meaning 'Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology Co., Ltd.' The term 'Zhipu' was sometimes translated by Chinese researchers as 'Wisdom Spectrum'. It is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as Z.AI Co., Ltd. and branded internationally as Z.ai. ## Founding and Early Development Zhipu AI was founded in 2019, originating from Tsinghua University and later spun out as an independent company. In May 2022, researchers published an Association for Computational Linguistics conference paper introducing the GLM training algorithm, which uses an "autoregressive blank infilling" strategy. This approach creates cloze tests by randomly removing segments of input text and trains the model to autoregressively regenerate the removed text, a technique that distinguishes it from earlier [transformer](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/transformer)-based architectures. In 2023, the company raised 2.5 billion yuan (approximately US$350 million) from Alibaba Group and Tencent, along with Meituan, Ant Group, Xiaomi, and HongShan. This substantial funding positioned Zhipu AI as a key player in China's competitive AI landscape, often compared to [openai](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/openai) and [anthropic](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/anthropic) in the West. ## 2024: GLM-4 and Expansion In March 2024, Zhipu AI announced it was developing a Sora-like technology to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). In May 2024, the Saudi Arabian finance firm Prosperity7 Ventures participated in a US$400 million financing round for Zhipu AI, valuing the company at approximately US$3 billion. In July 2024, the company debuted the Ying text-to-video model, capable of generating six-second video clips from image and text prompts within about 30 seconds. Zhipu released GLM-4-Plus in August 2024, a significant upgrade to its flagship model series. In October 2024, the company released GLM-4-Voice, an end-to-end speech [large-language-model](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/large-language-model) that can adjust its tone or dialect, demonstrating advances in multimodal AI. ## 2025: Rebranding and Open-Source Shift Zhipu disclosed in April 2025 that it had started preparing for its initial public offering and released two models under the free and open-source MIT License. In May 2025, the company sealed a 61.28 million yuan deal from the Chinese government for city projects in Hangzhou, highlighting its role in smart city initiatives. In July 2025, Zhipu AI released GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air, its next-generation language models, and rebranded itself as Z.ai internationally. In August 2025, Z.ai announced that its GLM models are compatible with Huawei's Ascend processors, a strategic move to reduce reliance on foreign chips. On 11 August 2025, Z.ai released a new vision-language model (VLM) with 106B parameters, GLM-4.5V. In late September 2025, the company released GLM-4.6 using China's domestic chips, such as those from Cambricon Technologies, marking the first integration of FP8 and Int4 quantization on Cambricon chips. Z.ai released GLM-4.6V and GLM-4.7 in December 2025. That same year, the company changed its official name to Knowledge Atlas Technology JSC Ltd. ## IPO and Subsequent Developments On 8 January 2026, Z.ai held its IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, becoming China's first major LLM company to go public. The IPO was a milestone for the Chinese AI industry, attracting significant investor attention. On 12 February 2026, Z.ai released GLM-5, a major model update. However, in late February 2026, the company's shares fell by 23% due to a shortage of compute resources, leading to user complaints and Z.ai issuing a public call for support. The company also restricted new user signups to manage demand. In late March 2026, Z.ai released the GLM-5.1 model to subscription users. On 7 April 2026, GLM-5.1 was released as open-source, and the same day, Z.ai increased its API prices by 10%, while maintaining a lower price than its US competitor Anthropic's Opus 4.6 model. On release, the company's share price increased 11.5%. On 16 June 2026, GLM-5.2 was released with a one-million-token context window, an increase from GLM-5.1's 200K-token context window. On 14 August 2026, GLM-5.3 was released, using the same 743 billion parameter base model as GLM-5.2 but with improved post-training. ## Products and Services Z.AI provides a range of products and services centered around its GLM model family: - **GLM (General Language Model)**: Formerly known as ChatGLM, this series of pre-trained dialogue models was initially developed by Zhipu AI and Tsinghua KEG in 2023. GLM-4.5, released in July 2025, can run on eight NVIDIA H20 chips. GLM-4.6, released in late September 2025, supports native FP8 on Moore Threads GPUs. - **Ying**: A text-to-video model that generates image and text prompts into a six-second video clip within about 30 seconds. - **AutoGLM**: 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 on the user's shopping history. - **AMiner**: A research database created by Jie Tang in March 2006, now owned by Z.ai. Z.AI has offices in the Middle East, United Kingdom, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with innovation center projects across Southeast Asia (2025). In January 2025, the United States Commerce Department added the company to its Entity List, citing national security concerns. ### ZCode ZCode is an AI coding development environment developed by Z.ai. It was released on 2 July 2026 as a desktop application for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and was initially designed around Z.ai's GLM large language models. ZCode includes an AI coding agent that can read and modify project files, execute terminal commands, work with Git, and use a built-in web browser to test applications. ZCode supports models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Moonshot AI, and models through OpenRouter, making it a versatile tool for developers. ## See Also - List of artificial intelligence companies - List of large language models - Lists of open-source artificial intelligence software --- Source: https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/zhipu-ai-2024 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) Last updated: 2026-09-13T03:56:01.225188+00:00