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.















