Z.ai co-founder Tang Jie and Moonshot AI founder Zhilin Yang share Tsinghua University roots as XLNet co-authors

Original post

thing i know about http://z.ai, the company behind GLM:

1. http://z.ai is known as "Zhipu" before being rebranded as a sleeker "http://z.ai". The Chinese name still tells you the lineage: “智谱” means knowledge graphs or intelligence graph. It is born from the academic knowledge graphs AMiner from Tsinghua

2. http://z.ai came out of Tsinghua’s orbit, and an embodiment of the Tsinghua-to-company pipeline

3. Tang Jie, the founder, is still “Professor Tang” to many people. He reads less like a Silicon Valley founder and more like a CEO grown out of China’s University-State-Industry system

4. http://z.ai is very 2G / 2 enterprise: it's the AI company that installs controllable large-model capacity into banks, governments, SEOs, schools, and office systems

5. one funny detail i cannot stop thinking about: Tang Jie owns http://bigmodel.cn. “big model” is a literal china-english translation for 大模型 (LLM) but funnier

6. Tang Jie was also the undergraduate research advisor of Yang Zhilin, Moonshot’s founder.

5:15 PM · Jun 22, 2026 · 38.3K Views

bigmodel.cn

BIGMODEL.CNVia

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Teortaxes▶️ (DeepSeek 推特🐋铁粉 2023 – ∞)@teortaxesTex

> authors:… Zhilin Yang, Jie Tang notice something? The founder of Moonshot is a student of the co-founder of Zhipu. Typical Tsinghua.

Rohan Pandey@khoomeik

TIL the GLM series is 5+ years old, and started as a unification of masked encoder & causal decoder methods

hence the name "General Language Model" (GLM), but no idea if they still use this masking method in GLM-5.2

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OedoSoldier@OedoSoldier

They all trace back to BAAI, a nonprofit research organization led by the Beijing municipal government and jointly established with institutions such as THU, PKU, CAS, etc. The “Wudao” large model developed through collaboration with Tsinghua later evolved into GLM; the M6 multimodal large model developed through collaboration with Alibaba later evolved into Qwen

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Paul Triolo@pstAsiatech

@afrazhaowang 智谱" (Zhì Pǔ) can be translated as "Knowledge Atlas". This translation is famously associated with Knowledge Atlas Technology (the company behind Zhipu AI), which uses it as their official English trade and corporate name...on Hong Kong exchange....

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Sean@SomethingOnSnow

@afrazhaowang Chinese universities seem to actually teach AI which is why their students go on to create AI businesses. US universities don’t have the pipeline which suggests they don’t teach the skills.

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