The simultaneous launch on Monday highlights both companies’ initiatives to generate enthusiasm for their upcoming Hong Kong initial public offerings.
Chinese start-ups Zhipu AI and MiniMax have released new flagship artificial intelligencemodels appearing within a short time frame of each other, as they compete to emerge as the top provider of open-source AI systems globally.
The almost simultaneous launch by two of China’s“AI tigers”emphasized attempts to generate enthusiasm for their owninitial public offerings in Hong Kong, following both companies’ successful completion of key regulatory hearings over the weekend.
Beijing-Zhipu AI, internationally known as Z.ai, stated on Monday night that its latest GLM-4.7 model has enhanced coding capabilities, reducing the gap with bigger American companies.Google DeepMind and Anthropic in innovative coding agents.
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Zhipu AI highlighted the impressive scores obtained by GLM-4.7 on multiple coding benchmarks, which exceeded those ofOpenAI‘s GPT-5, which came out in August. GLM-4.7’s results were slightly lower than those of Google DeepMind’s Gemini Pro 3 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5.
At SWE-Bench, a platform that assesses models on practical software engineering challenges, Anthropic surpassed the 70 percent threshold in May using its earlier Claude Opus 4 model, marking it as the first proprietary company to accomplish this. Zhipu AI’s GLM-4.7 recently achieved the same milestone for the first time on Monday.
On the same day, in a blog post, Zhipu AI stated that benchmarks were “just one method to assess performance.” It advised users to gain a “sense” of how the GLM-4.7 model functioned.
Hours later, Shanghai– based MiniMax launched its M2.1 model, which also showed significant enhancements in coding skills during internal evaluations, although it still trailed behind Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5.
MiniMax stated that M2.1 provides “industry-leading” features for handling multiple programming languages—such as Java, Rust, and Golang—simultaneously.
The M2.1 also received high marks on a newly developed internal benchmark known as VIBE, as stated by MiniMax. This benchmark assesses AI models based on their capability to “vibe code,” where non-professional programmers utilizegenerative AIto develop tailored software applications using language instructions.
Although Zhipu AI has already made the weights of GLM-4.7 available, enabling developers globally to run the model on their own equipment, MiniMax mentioned that it will release the weights of M2.1 later this week. A model’s weights are the parameters that represent its “intelligence,” which are modified during the training process.
GLM-4.7 marked Zhipu AI’s third significant upgrade to its leading model series within the last six months, whereas the latest MiniMax release constituted a substantial update tothe M2 modellaunched only two months ago.
Alibaba Group Holding-backed Zhipu, established in 2019 by professors from China’s renowned institutionsTsinghua University, could generate approximately US$300 million through its Hong Kong IPO next month, as reported by analysts. Alibaba holds the Post.
MiniMax, supported also by Alibaba, was established in 2022 by former employeesSenseTimeComputer vision specialist Yan Junjie. The startup was anticipated to secure up to $700 million through its Hong Kong initial public offering, according to Reuters on Monday.
Both companies are anticipated to utilize their initial public offering funds to increase investment in research and development, which will include expenditures on cutting-edge AI chips anddata centre resources.
“The link between the quality of models and the survival of companies is diminishing [within China’s AI sector], whereas the connection between access to capital and survival is becoming more significant,” noted Poe Zhao, a tech analyst based in Beijing and the founder of the Hello China Tech newsletter.
As per its regulatory submission released over the weekend, MiniMax’s revenue for the first nine months of 2025 increased by almost 175% to $53.4 million compared to the previous year. Meanwhile, losses expanded by 68% to $512 million.
Zhipu AI’s income increased by 325 percent in the first half of 2025, reaching 190.9 million yuan (US$27 million), whereas its losses rose to 2.36 billion yuan.
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This piece was first published in the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com), a top news outlet covering China and Asia.
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