Chinese company launches new AI model cheaper than DeepSeek

Not only is it cheap, China's new AI model is offered as open source, allowing developers to download and use it for free.

China's low-cost AI "race" has a new model, GLM - 4.5 - Illustration photo

Beijing-based AI startup Z.ai (formerly known as Zhipu) has just announced a new artificial intelligence (AI) model called GLM-4.5.

As introduced by Z.ai, GLM-4.5 is developed in the direction of "agentic AI", allowing the model to automatically break down a task into smaller steps for more precise processing.

“Agentic AI” is an artificial intelligence system that is capable of making decisions, planning, and taking actions to achieve goals without constant human intervention. This is a step further than traditional AI, which only responds to commands without the ability to act proactively.

Additionally, the GLM-4.5 model is available as open source, allowing developers to download and use it for free.

Notably, Z.ai announced that it will charge $0.11 per million input tokens, lower than the $0.14 of the DeepSeek R1 model. For output tokens, Z.ai charges $0.28 per million tokens, while DeepSeek charges $2.19.

Tokens are units of measurement for data used for processing in AI models.

Z.ai CEO Zhang Bang said GLM-4.5 is half the size of DeepSeek's model and only needs eight Nvidia H20 chips to operate.

The H20 is an AI chip designed by Nvidia, a US-based multinational technology corporation, specifically for the Chinese market, in order to comply with export control regulations of the US President Donald Trump's administration. Nvidia is now allowed to resume sales to China after a 3-month suspension, but it is unclear when the first shipments will be delivered.

Last January, Chinese startup DeepSeek caused a big shock in the US market after announcing its AI model with similar features to ChatGPT - a generative AI model of OpenAI.

Raised more than 1.5 billion USD from 'big guys', including Alibaba and Tencent

OpenAI mentioned Z.ai in a warning about China’s rapid growth in AI in late June. The US government subsequently added the start-up to its entity list, which restricts it from doing business with US companies.

Z.ai was founded in 2019. According to market research and data provider PitchBook, Z.ai has raised more than $1.5 billion from major investors, including Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent.

In recent times, many Chinese technology companies have launched new open-source AI models. In early July, Beijing-based Moonshot released Kimi K2, claiming that it has some superior coding capabilities compared to ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Claude (Anthropic).

Simply put, coding is the work of writing computer programs using programming languages.

VNA

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/cong-ty-trung-quoc-tung-mo-hinh-ai-moi-re-hon-ca-deepseek-20250729224144193.htm