Accurate despite Zhipu ain't Palantir equivalent. PLA has little trust in Zhipu, nor has it been a defense contractor, nor is it shrewd enough in SaaS marketing and productization. It had always been Beijing municipal gov pushing zhipu forward, not the state or the military.
SITUATION EXPLAINED: What does the Chinese AI ecosystem actually look like beyond DeepSeek?
Gabrierl (.@gbrl_dick) asked @FleetingBits, anonymous AI researcher.
"Most people are familiar with DeepSeek. But if we look at other Chinese labs like Zhipu, Minimax, Moonshot, ByteDance, they're a little bit less well known."
"Zhipu is sort of the Chinese equivalent of Palantir... it receives state support through contracts with state-owned enterprises. GLM 5.2 was a Zhipu model. And unique among Chinese AI labs, it has actually pretty good gross margins, around 40%. All of its revenue comes from these state-owned enterprises for which it does these Palantir deployments where it takes its GLM models and deploys them locally on their hardware."
"MiniMax is interesting because they're sort of the character AI of China, a companion app called Talky and a video generation app called Hailuo. And the majority of their revenue comes from outside China, including a decent chunk from the United States."
"Doubao, which is ByteDance's equivalent of ChatGPT, is the most popular AI app in China."
"The Chinese ChatGPT is actually ByteDance. And I think they don't make a splash in America because they don't open source any of their models."
