science

Z.ai

Z.ai is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Z.ai rather than just read about it. In short: Z.AI Co., Ltd., branded internationally as Z.ai, is a Chinese artificial intelligence company specializing in open weights large language models (LLMs). The company was formerly known as Zhipu AI outside China until its rebranding in 2025.

Key takeaways

Z.ai belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Z.ai to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Z.ai from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Z.AI Co., Ltd., branded internationally as Z.ai, is a Chinese artificial intelligence company specializing in open weights large language models (LLMs). The company was formerly known as Zhipu AI outside China until its rebranding in 2025. Z.ai's flagship product is the GLM (General Language Model) family of LLMs, which the company has released under the free and open-source MIT License since July 2025; they have also released vision language models and text-to-video models. As of 2024, it is one of China's six "AI tiger" companies by investors and considered to be 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 in its Entity List due to national security concerns. It is considered to be China's first major LLM company that went through an initial public offering, on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January 2026, closing the day at US$558 million. Z.ai owns AMiner, a research database similar to Google Scholar.

Name 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, '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.

History

Founded in 2019, the startup company began from Tsinghua University and was later spun out as an independent company. Researchers published an Association for Computational Linguistics conference paper in May 2022 introducing the GLM (General Language Model) training algorithm, which uses an "autoregressive blank infilling" strategy that creates cloze tests by randomly removing segments of input text and trains the model to autoregressively regenerate the removed text. In 2023, it raised 2.5 billion yuan (approx. 350 million in USD) from Alibaba Group and Tencent, along with Meituan, Ant Group, Xiaomi, and HongShan. 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, LLC participated in a US$400 million financing round for Zhipu AI with a valuation of approximately US$3 billion. In July 2024, they debuted the Ying text-to-video model. Zhipu released GLM-4-Plus in August 2024. In October 2024, Zhipu released GLM-4-Voice, an end-to-end speech large language model that can adjust its tone or dialect. Zhipu disclosed in April 2025 that it had started preparing for its initial public offering (IPO) 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. In July 2025, Zhipu AI released GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air, their next generation language models, and the company rebranded itself as Z.ai internationally. In August 2025, Z.ai announced that their GLM models are compatible with Huawei's Ascend processors. On August 11, 2025, Z.ai released a new vision-language model (VLM) with a total of 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. 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. On 8 January 2026, Z.ai held its IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to become a listed company. It is considered to be China's first major LLM company that went through an IPO. On 12 February 2026, Z.ai released GLM-5. In late February 2026, Z.ai's shares fell by 23% as it experienced a shortage of compute resources, leading to user complaints and Z.ai issuing a public call for support. Z.ai also restricted new user signups. In late March 2026, Z.ai released the GLM-5.1 model to subscription users. On 7 April 2026, Z.ai released GLM-5.1 as open-source. The same day, Z.ai increased its API prices by 10%, but maintained a lower price than its United States 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. It uses the same 743 billion parameter base model as GLM-5.2, but with improved post-training.

Products and services Z.AI provides the following products and services:

GLM (initialism for General Language Model; formerly known as ChatGLM), a series of pre-trained dialogue models initially developed by Zhipu AI and Tsinghua KEG in 2023. GLM-4.5, released in July 2025 by Z.ai, can run on eight NVIDIA H20 chips. 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. Ying, a text-to-video model that generates image and text prompts into a six-second video clip within about 30 seconds. ZCode, an AI coding environment designed for agentic software development, available as a desktop application for macOS, Windows, and Linux. 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 from the user's shopping history. AMiner, created by Jie Tang (co-founder of Z.ai) 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.

Illustrations

Logo from 2019 to 2025

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Z.ai

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Z.ai claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Z.ai before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Z.ai ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Z.ai

In research: Z.ai appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Z.ai in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Z.ai is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2019 establishments in China, 2019 in artificial intelligence, 2026 initial public offerings, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Z.ai outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Z.ai in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Z.ai means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Z.ai out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Z.ai in simple terms?

Why does Z.ai matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Z.ai?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Z.ai.