A new AI model has been introduced in China. Called GLM-4.5, this is an open-source model unlike most of the US-based AI systems that are closed, and some benchmarks put it ahead of even DeepSeek R1 and ChatGPT. GLM 4.5 has been developed by startup Z.ai (formerly known as Zhipu). According to the company, this model is designed specifically for intelligent agent tasks and uses what is described as an “agentic” AI architecture. This means that the AI model can autonomously take on tasks and handle reasoning, coding and other applications more effectively.
According to the company, GLM-4.5 is a large language model featuring 355 billion total parameters, with an optimised variant named GLM-4.5 Air that has 106 billion parameters, making it lighter and faster. The model supports a context window of 128,000 tokens, allowing it to process long conversations or documents without losing focus. It is also said to include native function calling, enabling seamless integration with external software and workflows. The company highlights that these capabilities make GLM-4.5 suitable for a wide range of applications, including advanced coding, physics simulations, game development and interactive mini-games.
The company has also revealed that the GLM 4.5 has been released under an Apache 2.0 open-source licence. This means it is free for use and developers can freely download and deploy it, CNBC reported.
Z.ai claims that GLM4.5 ranks third globally and first among Chinese and open-source models across 12 major AI evaluation benchmarks. According to the company, the model scored 98.2 per cent on the MATH500 reasoning test and 91 per cent on the AIME24 challenge. It also delivered 64.2 per cent accuracy on SWE-Bench Verified, a benchmark used for software engineering tasks, and achieved a 90.6 per cent tool-calling success rate, edging out leading rivals.
Powered by Nvidia chip
One of GLM4.5’s biggest advantages is cost. Z.ai CEO ZhangPeng told CNBC that the model can run on just eight Nvidia H20 chips. These chips are designed specifically for the Chinese market under US export controls. This is roughly half the hardware required by DeepSeek’s comparable model. ZhangPeng revealed that the company does not currently need to purchase additional chips, indicating that the model already has sufficient computing capacity.
Cheaper than DeepSeek
The company reveals that it has also aggressively cut token pricing. Z.ai will charge $0.11 per million input tokens compared with $0.14 for DeepSeek R1, and $0.28 per million output tokens. This is lower than the $2.19 charged by DeepSeek. Notably, tokens are the standard unit of data measurement for AI models.
For context, DeepSeek, the advanced LLM launched earlier this year, is developed by the Chinese startup High Flyer AI and is known for rivalling OpenAI’s ChatGPT in natural language understanding and reasoning, while requiring significantly less training cost, reportedly under $6 million. Although GLM-4.5 is about half the size of DeepSeek, it is touted to be using agentic AI design to maintain high accuracy and flexibility in completing tasks with fewer computational resources.
Interestingly, the arrival of GLM-4.5 comes at a time when China’s AI model development is seeing a rapid surge. By July, Chinese companies had released 1,509 large language models, more than any other country, according to the state-owned Xinhua news agency.
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