China’s Zhipu AI, developer of GLM-5.2, defies slump as it pursues AGI over quick profits

Chinese AI giant Zhipu AI bucked a broad slump in AI stocks on Monday, closing nearly flat after pledging to prioritize advancing towards artificial general intelligence over near-term commercialisation. The company's stock has surged 12-fold since its January debut, though its market cap has dropped to HK$730 billion from a peak of over HK$1 trillion.

China’s Zhipu AI, developer of GLM-5.2, defies slump as it pursues AGI over quick profits Monday’s losses were seen across chip designers, semiconductor-equipment makers and materials suppliers Ben Jiang /author/ben-jiang in Beijing Chinese artificial intelligence giant Zhipu AI bucked a broad plunge of AI-related stocks across Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland on Monday, which saw arch-rival MiniMax slumping almost 20 per cent. Zhipu, trading as Knowledge Atlas Technology in Hong Kong, closed almost flat at HK$1,645 on Monday after its shares gained more than 1 per cent by midday. The company, whose stock has skyrocketed 12-fold since its January debut, over the weekend pledged to prioritise advancing towards artificial general intelligence AGI over near-term commercialisation. company founder Yan Junjie https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3360084/minimax-ceo-forgoes-salary-until-agi-achieved-firm-seeks-us2b-amid-80-stock-plunge?module=inline&pgtype=article also expressed determination to achieve AGI and pledged to forgo his salary until that level of intelligence was realised. Nevertheless, Zhipu AI has declined from its peak late last month, when its market capitalisation briefly surpassed HK$1 trillion US$128 billion following investor enthusiasm over its release of the GLM-5.2 model. Its market cap has dropped to HK$730 billion. The company said it would spend the next two years investing in frontier AI research, according to an internal letter issued on Saturday by Tang Jie, a company co-founder and renowned Chinese computer scientist at Tsinghua University, and seen by the South China Morning Post. The company “would not pursue short-term monetisation from AI applications”, but instead set its sights on the next frontier of AGI, when AI captures “the aggregation of all human intelligence”, Tang said in the letter.