# Another glimpse of the Chinese AI scene: Z.AI

Yesterday I had my first conversation (in English) with Zhipu's GLM-4.7. It was cool because I got to talk with an actual Chinese AI about topics like: the representation of Chinese AI in "AI 2027"; representations of AI in the "Culture" SF series versus the "Wandering Earth" movies; consequences of Fast Takeoff; comparisons of China and America in general; and Chinese ideas about AI society and superintelligence. (An aligned Chinese superintelligence might be a heavenly bureaucrat or a Taoist sage.)

It was one of those AI conversations where you know that something really new is happening, and I now consider GLM to be as interesting as the leading American models. (A year ago I also spoke with DeepSeek-r1, but it never grabbed my attention the way that GLM has done.)

So what's the status of the Chinese AI sector? In the same way that in America, AI is pursued by older Internet titans (Google, Meta/Facebook, X-Twitter) as well as by newer companies that specialize in AI (OpenAI, Anthropic), the Chinese AI sector is a mix of big old Internet companies with all the money (Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu) and "AI 2.0" startups (Zhipu, DeepSeek, Moonshot). 

Keeping in mind this two-tier structure, shared with the American AI sector, is probably the best way for an outsider to get a grip on it. The Chinese AI sector is "like America", except that they do much more open-source, don't have American AI's access to the best chips or the same international brand recognition, and are based in a country with a socialist government and most of the world's manufacturing capability. 

For keeping track of what's happening, my best recommendations are [ChinaTalk substack](https://www.chinatalk.media/t/ai) (which Zvi also recommends) and [Caixin Global](https://www.caixinglobal.com/), which is a business news site from China. 

In a Caixin story (["China’s AI Titans Escalate Battle for Control of Digital Gateways"](https://archive.is/wB0iF)), I read that the old Internet titans (Alibaba and ByteDance are mentioned) are prevailing in the battle for AI market share, and are competing to lock in that advantage at the level of devices, while the AI 2.0 startups are struggling for relevance and funding, with two of them (Zhipu and MiniMax) having recently listed publicly at the Hong Kong stock exchange. 

ChinaTalk has an article on these Hong Kong IPOs (["Zhipu and MiniMax IPO"](https://www.chinatalk.media/p/zhipu-and-minimax-ipo) by Irene Zhang) which also talks about the differences in financial structure between American and Chinese AI: 

> The American AI economy is a circle-dealing bonanza. China’s situation is very different: state funds are major players, most parties are far more cash-constrained, and potential policy interventions loom large over the sector.

Of these two companies, Zhipu seems far more interesting from an AGI/ASI perspective. As Irene Zhang points out, [Zhipu's 504-page prospectus](https://www1.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2025/1230/2025123000017.pdf) (for the IPO) states a five-stage theory of LLM capabilities:  

> Pre-training stage   
> Alignment and reasoning stage  
> Self-learning stage  
> Self-perception stage  
> Consciousness stage 

(From page 85 of the prospectus.) I am unable to determine the theoretical precursors of this framework, and I assume that to some extent it reflects the original thinking of leading developers within the company. 

Late last year ChinaTalk also published an interview with one of Zhipu's lead strategists, Zixuan Li (["The Z.ai Playbook"](https://www.chinatalk.media/p/the-zai-playbook) \- Zhipu uses the domain Z.ai outside of China). Both ChinaTalk articles are full of interesting details, e.g. that Zhipu gets most of its revenue from American sales, but the numerical majority of its users are in India. 

(For an up-to-date article on AI safety policies in China, see ["Emergency Response Measures for Catastrophic AI Risk"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AJ6ntMdcspifkLryB/emergency-response-measures-for-catastrophic-ai-risk) by [@MKodama](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/mkodama?mention=user) and coauthors.)