Z.ai
publicZ.ai (formerly Zhipu AI, rebranded internationally in July 2025) is one of China's "AI Tigers," originating from the Knowledge Engineering Group (KEG) at Tsinghua University. Co-founded in 2019 by Prof. Jie Tang and Prof. Li Juanzi, both Tsinghua CS faculty. Jie Tang is also the creator of AMiner, one of the world's largest academic search and mining systems, and vice director of BAAI.
Z.ai made history as the first major LLM-focused company to IPO, listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX: 02513) on January 8, 2026, raising ~$560M. Pre-IPO funding totaled ~$1.5B from investors including Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan, Meituan, and Saudi Prosperity7.
The cornerstone is the GLM (General Language Model) architecture, using a unique autoregressive blank-infilling objective (ACL 2022). ChatGLM-6B became one of the most popular open-source Chinese LLMs (37K+ GitHub stars), running on consumer GPUs with just 6GB VRAM. The series progressed through GLM-4, GLM-4.5, to GLM-5 (February 2026) — a 744B MoE trained entirely on 100,000 Huawei Ascend 910B chips with zero NVIDIA dependency, a milestone for China's AI compute sovereignty.
People
- Jie Tang (唐杰) Google ScholarOpenReviewWikipedia — Co-founder & Chief Scientist (also Chair Professor & Foundation Model Research Center director, Tsinghua) (formerly PhD Tsinghua (2006); MS/BS Yanshan University)
- Li Juanzi OpenReview — Co-founder (formerly Tsinghua University (CS))
- Zhang Peng — CEO
- Liu Debing — Chairman
- Yuxiao Dong OpenReview — Senior Researcher
- Ming Ding OpenReview — Former Principal Researcher (CogView/CogVideo lead author; joined ByteDance Seed 2024) (formerly Tsinghua University (PhD 2018-2023, advisor Jie Tang))
- Aohan Zeng OpenReview — Core Researcher (GLM)
- Zhengxiao Du Google ScholarOpenReview — Tech Lead, GLM base models (ChatGLM pre-training) (formerly Tsinghua University (PhD 2025, advisor Jie Tang))
- Yuxuan Zhang GitHub — Core Researcher (CogVideoX)
- Xiao Liu — Tech Lead, AutoGLM (foundation agents) (formerly Tsinghua University (PhD candidate, KEG, advisor Jie Tang))
- Jiezhong Qiu Google ScholarGitHub — GLM (2022) co-author; now at Zhejiang Lab (formerly Tsinghua University (BS/PhD, KEG, advisor Jie Tang))
- Yujie Qian LinkedInGoogle Scholar — GLM (2022) co-author; now at Thinking Machines Lab (formerly MIT CSAIL (PhD 2023, advisor Regina Barzilay); Voyage AI (founding research scientist))
News
- 2026-06-16 Z.ai GLM-5.2 Tops the AA Intelligence Index as the Highest-Scoring Open Model (51); MIT Open Weights Released — Crypto Briefing
- 2026-04-08 Zhipu Hikes Prices Again as China AI Monetization Wave Quickens — Bloomberg
- 2026-04-07 GLM-5.1 Open-Source Release Scores #3 on Code Arena (1530 Elo); Stock Surges 19% — BuildFastWithAI
- 2026-03-31 Zhipu's Losses Climb 60% After Chinese AI Rivalry Worsens — Bloomberg
- 2026-03-31 Zhipu's Losses Climb 60% After Chinese AI Rivalry Worsens — Bloomberg
- 2026-03-18 Chinese AI Developer Zhipu to Create New Unit for Product Development — The Information
- 2026-01-09 Zhipu and MiniMax IPO — ChinaTalk
- 2025-12-23 Zhipu AI's Rise from Tsinghua Lab — Pandaily
- 2025-10-14 Zhipu AI Breaks US Chip Reliance With First Major Model Trained on Huawei Stack — SCMP