(Corrects paragraph 18 to fix formatting) <\/p>\n
By Laurie Chen <\/p>\n
BEIJING, June 25 (Reuters) – Chinese AI startup Z.ai said on Thursday it plans to use domestic listing proceeds to fund a quest for artificial general intelligence, after its latest model scored close to leading U.S. models from Anthropic \u200cand OpenAI on public benchmarks. <\/p>\n
Z.ai’s flagship GLM-5.2 model, released a day after Anthropic disabled worldwide access to its most advanced models, stunned global \u200cusers after its performance benchmarks narrowly trailed leading closed-source models. <\/p>\n
“Our mission is to obtain AGI, so right now our focus is how to improve our model to achieve the upper bound of intelligence. So \u200ball these resources are helping us,” said Qinkai Zheng, technical lead of the firm’s CodeGeeX team. <\/p>\n
The accompanying surge in investor interest sent shares rallying more than 2,000% from their blockbuster Hong Kong debut in January, to cross a threshold of HK$1 trillion ($128 billion) in market capitalisation this week. <\/p>\n
“This model is comparable to the top closed models,” Zheng told reporters at its head office in Beijing. <\/p>\n
“It’s the first time that an open-source model really delivers very solid coding and agent performance that can compare with the \u200cleading proprietary AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.” <\/p>\n
GLM-5.2 now \u2060holds fourth place on Artificial Analysis’ LLM intelligence leaderboard and the second spot on Code Arena’s front-end coding leaderboard, operating at roughly a sixth of the cost of closed U.S. frontier models. <\/p>\n
The sudden “unplugging” of closed U.S. frontier models has unleashed severe anxiety \u2060among global allies such as Canada and France, whose leaders heavily criticised over-reliance on U.S.-controlled AI infrastructure at a G7 summit last week. <\/p>\n