This week, I had the chance to interview Lou from Z.ai. It was really a great conversation to talk to her about the work that they are doing there and how they look at developing newer models and her view toward AGI.
I get the feeling of just incredible hard work that Zhipu is going through as part of their effort to produce the best models and products out there. You can see that with GLM-5.1, which I can attest to as being very good for programming. It can do a lot of thinking of solve problems. I get the sense that GLM models are now able to do some form of RSI (Recursive Self Improvement) where the models help improve or create new more powerful models.
One thing that stand out to me about GLM models is their size. They are in the 750B param range which can still fit as Quantized models and run locally on boxes with really large VRAM. However, they are also large enough that they are competitive with larger models. I think there are probably some sacrifices that you have to make in a 750B param model vs 1.6T or 3T param models.
It will be very interesting to see where Z.ai goes from here since they have now received a lot of funding since IPO which gives them a larger war chest to do the work that they need to do.
