Beijing, June 27: Nearly 18 months after Chinese AI startup DeepSeek shook Silicon Valley with its powerful yet inexpensive AI model, another Chinese company has captured the industry’s attention. Beijing-based Zhipu AI has launched its flagship coding model, GLM 5.2, earning praise from developers and researchers for combining strong performance with low operating costs.
Released earlier this month under the international brand Z.AI, GLM 5.2 is already being described as the next “DeepSeek moment.” Many users have called it the first reliable open-weight model suitable for everyday coding, offering a practical alternative to expensive proprietary systems.
Former Meta Platforms and Google DeepMind executive Matt Veloso said he had spent an entire day using GLM 5.2 and considered it the first open model capable of handling daily development work. Comparing it with OpenAI’s premium GPT 5.5 model, he said the Chinese model is more practical, avoids unnecessary explanations and focuses on completing tasks efficiently.
The model arrived just a day after US AI company Anthropic restricted access to its most advanced public model, Claude Fable 5, for users in several countries in line with Washington’s export controls.
GLM 5.2 is the latest in a series of increasingly competitive Chinese AI models, following DeepSeek V4 Pro, MiniMax M3 and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.7 Max. It is the first Chinese model to rank among the world’s top three on a major coding benchmark. Its ability to process hundreds of pages of text or code in a single session has helped it secure second place globally for front-end coding performance, behind only Anthropic’s Fable 5.
Coding assistants have become one of the fastest-growing commercial uses of large language models, driving rapid revenue growth for AI companies. AI researcher Nathan Lambert said GLM 5.2 is the first open weight model that offers a credible alternative to leading commercial systems. He compared its arrival to DeepSeek’s R1 model, which demonstrated last year that smaller open labs could build reasoning models comparable to OpenAI’s early systems.
Brookings Institution fellow Kyle Chan said GLM 5.2 signals another turning point for Chinese AI. He argued the model shows China remains only a few months behind the United States despite having access to fewer advanced computing resources.
The model still trails the most advanced US systems on some software engineering benchmarks, ranking behind Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Opus 4.8, as well as OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 and GPT 5.4. Users have also reported occasional problems, including abandoning tasks midway and consuming more memory. Even so, analysts say GLM 5.2 costs about 48 per cent less to run than Anthropic’s competing models, making it an attractive option despite its remaining limitations.
People’s News Monitoring Service
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