GLM (Zhipu AI)
Chinese AI lab with open-weight models spanning text, vision, voice, and video generation
Free and open-weight, API from ~$3/mo, self-host free
Overview
GLM (General Language Model) is Zhipu AI's flagship family of large language models, developed at Tsinghua University. The ChatGLM series offers strong bilingual (Chinese-English) performance and is one of the most widely used open-source models in China's AI ecosystem.
Key Features
- GLM-4: frontier-class model competitive on major Chinese and English benchmarks
- Strong bilingual performance across Chinese and English
- Long context support up to 128K tokens
- Code generation, function calling, and tool use
- Open-source GLM models available for self-hosting
- Zhipu AI API for production deployment
Pricing: Free tier available; API pricing varies by model and token volume.
Pros
- Full multimodal stack including text vision voice image gen and video gen in one family
- Preserved Thinking maintains reasoning chains across conversation turns
- Very affordable API pricing starting at ~$3/mo
- Strong research foundation from Tsinghua University
Cons
- Primarily Chinese-language documentation and community
- Less mature global platform compared to Western competitors
- Limited third-party ecosystem and integrations outside China
Tags
Product Updates
Similar Tools
DeepSeek
Chinese AI lab's open-weight models with frontier reasoning at ultra-low cost
Llama
Meta's open-weight family spanning Llama 3.1 (8B–405B) and Llama 3.2 (1B–90B vision)
Qwen
Alibaba's comprehensive open-weight family spanning text, code, vision, audio, and speech
Mistral
French AI lab offering frontier models from edge to enterprise with open-weight options
