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China’s Zhipu AI launches new major model GLM-5 in challenge to its rivals
The GLM-5 represents a shift in AI development from ‘vibe coding’ to ‘agentic engineering’ to generate an enhanced performance
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Chinese artificial intelligence company Zhipu AI has launched its latest flagship model, the GLM-5, with a leap in coding capabilities amid a heated race among Chinese tech firms to roll out major new models ahead of the Spring Festival holiday.
Zhipu AI, known internationally as Z.ai, said that the GLM-5 represented a shift in AI development from “vibe coding” to “agentic engineering” – AI-automated coding at a larger scale – thanks to its latest model’s enhanced performance.
The model’s release overnight pushed the Hong Kong shares of Zhipu, officially listed as Knowledge Atlas Technology, up 28.7 per cent to HK$402 on Thursday.
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The company said that GLM-5 achieved industry-leading scores for open models in key areas such as coding and agentic performance according to internal tests, even surpassing Google DeepMind’s most powerful model, Gemini 3 Pro.
However, the model still lagged Anthropic’s Claude, a proprietary model and widely considered the world’s best coding model, across the board on coding benchmarks, according to the company’s self-reported scores.
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The new model doubled the size of its predecessor, GLM-4.7, from 355 billion to 744 billion parameters and increased the training data to 28.5 trillion tokens. It also adopted a new architecture, first pioneered by the Hangzhou start-up DeepSeek, called DeepSeek Sparse Attention, designed to maximise computational and cost efficiency.
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