Zhipu AI

A Chinese AI company spun out of Tsinghua University, creator of the GLM (General Language Model) family — strong on bilingual Chinese-English work and a major player in China's enterprise AI.

Zhipu AI (智譜 AI) is a Chinese AI company spun out of Tsinghua University's Knowledge Engineering Group around 2019. Their core model line is GLM (General Language Model), which has been developed alongside academic research at Tsinghua. The company is one of China's "AI six tigers" startups and has raised billions in funding from major Chinese investors. It matters because GLM was one of the first Chinese-developed open-source LLMs (ChatGLM-6B in 2023 was widely adopted by Chinese developers when frontier models were inaccessible). GLM models are also notable for genuinely bilingual Chinese-English training rather than being mostly-English with Chinese added, making them strong at Chinese tasks without sacrificing English ability. Key products: ChatGLM (open-source consumer line, multiple generations), GLM-4 (frontier commercial model), CogVLM and CogView (multimodal vision and image generation), and the Zhipu Qingyan (清言) consumer chatbot. The company also offers an API platform popular in Chinese enterprise integrations. Zhipu has stayed close to academia — many of its researchers are also Tsinghua faculty or graduate students, and the company publishes substantial research papers. For Chinese-market builders evaluating bilingual models, GLM is a serious option alongside Qwen and DeepSeek. Related: GLM family, ChatGLM, Tsinghua, Chinese AI.