frontieropen-sourcemultimodal

Zhipu AI (GLM)

Tsinghua spinoff behind ChatGLM — the most downloaded Chinese open-source LLM series.

4
Models tracked
2019
Founded
GLM-4
Flagship model
Beijing
HQ
Visit zhipuai.cnDocumentation

About

About Zhipu AI (GLM)

Zhipu AI (智谱AI), a Tsinghua University spinoff founded in 2019, developed the GLM (General Language Model) architecture and the ChatGLM series — the most widely downloaded Chinese open-source language models. GLM-4 supports 128K context with strong bilingual performance and a free API tier. ChatGLM3-6B has accumulated tens of millions of downloads and is among the most-deployed Chinese models globally.

zhipuai.cn

Key highlights

  • ChatGLM3-6B is the most downloaded Chinese open-source model on Hugging Face

  • GLM-4-Flash offers 128K context completely free for developers

  • GLM architecture developed at Tsinghua with academic rigour

  • Priced at $0.14/M — among the cheapest frontier-quality APIs available

  • Full tool use, web search grounding, and code execution capabilities in GLM-4

Models

4 models tracked

Context windows, pricing, capabilities, and API identifiers — everything you need to choose the right model for your workload.

Flagship

GLM-4

2024

128Kcontext
TextCodeReasoning

Zhipu's flagship commercial model with 128K context. Competitive bilingual performance at one of the lowest prices in its class — $0.14/M for both input and output.

  • 128K context
  • Strong bilingual
  • Very low pricing
  • Tool use & function calling
In: $0.14 / M tokens
Out: $0.14 / M tokens
glm-4

GLM-4V

2024

8Kcontext
TextVision

GLM-4's multimodal vision variant. Handles complex image understanding, document analysis, and visual question answering in both English and Chinese.

  • Vision-language
  • Image understanding
  • Chart analysis
  • Bilingual VQA
glm-4v

GLM-4-Flash

2024

128Kcontext
TextCode

A free-tier GLM model with 128K context for developers and prototyping. Zhipu offers a generous free quota, making it an excellent entry point for testing.

  • Free tier available
  • 128K context
  • Fast inference
  • Zero-cost entry
glm-4-flash
Open Source

ChatGLM3-6B

2023

8Kcontext
TextCode

The open-weight 6B model that sparked mass adoption of Chinese LLMs. Runs on consumer GPUs and has been downloaded tens of millions of times from Hugging Face.

  • Fully open source
  • 6B compact size
  • On-device capable
  • Most-downloaded Chinese LLM
chatglm3-6b

Use Cases

What Zhipu AI (GLM) is best for

Each provider has specialisms shaped by their architecture decisions, training data, and API design. Here is where Zhipu AI (GLM) performs best.

Chinese open-source applications
Free-tier prototyping & development
Consumer-GPU on-device inference
Cost-minimised Chinese enterprise AI
Academic research into Chinese NLP

Get started

Start building with Zhipu AI (GLM)

Visit the official Zhipu AI (GLM) platform to access API keys, documentation, and pricing details.

Visit zhipuai.cnRead the docsBack to all providers