Z.ai
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] History The startup company began from Tsinghua University and was later spun out as an independent company.[4] In 2023, it raised 2.5 billion yuan (approx. 350 million in USD) with the help of Alibaba Group and Tencent.[5][6][7] Other investors of the company include Ant Group, Meituan, Xiaomi, and HongShan.[6] 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.[8] In March 2024, Zhipu AI said that they were developing a Sora-like technology to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI).[9] In July 2024, they debuted their "Ying" text-to-video model.[10] 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.[11] 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.[12] In July 2025, Zhipu AI released GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air, their next generation language models which topped several popular benchmarks.[13] 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.[14][15] Products and servicesGLMGLM (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.[16] 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.[17] YingDebuted 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.[10] AutoGLMReleased 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.[18] The AI tool runs on a series of AI models and chatbots, such as their ChatGLM chatbot, to process the required actions.[18] See alsoReferences
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