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 USD $400 million financing round for Zhipu AI with a valuation of approximately 3 billion USD. 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. In May 2025, the company sealed a 61.28 million yuan deal from the Chinese government for city projects in Hangzhou. In May 2025, the company sealed a 61.28 million yuan deal from the Chinese government for city projects in Hangzhou. It is considered to be China's first major LLM company that went through an IPO. In late February 2026, Z.ai's shares fell by 23%, and had 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 April 8th, 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%. == Description ==