According to reports, the U.S. Department of Commerce has placed Zhizhu AI on the Entity List for export controls, accusing it of promoting China's military modernization and threatening U.S. national security and diplomatic interests. **This decision makes Zhizhu AI the first Chinese large model company to be included on the U.S. Entity List, marking a new round of pressure from the U.S. on China's artificial intelligence industry.
Zhizhu AI subsequently released a statement emphasizing that the company originated from the technological achievements of Tsinghua University and provided a detailed review of its technological development history. Zhizhu AI began developing the GLM pre-training architecture in 2020, launched the open-source GLM-130B model in 2022, and released ChatGLM in 2023, with plans to introduce new generation models like GLM-4 and GLM-4-Plus by 2024. Zhizhu AI stated that despite facing U.S. sanctions, its mastery of core technologies for large models means that the current sanctions will not have a substantial impact on the company's normal operations and business development.
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As one of China's "Six Little Dragons" in the large model sector, Zhizhu AI shares significant similarities in technology route, model scale, and commercialization process with top international companies like OpenAI. Zhizhu AI provides large model services across various industries through its platform bigmodel.cn, and its product Zhizhu Qingyan has successfully served tens of millions of users. Earlier reports indicated that Zhizhu AI is in discussions with Apple to integrate its large model technology into the domestic iPhone, highlighting the potential of this collaboration and demonstrating Zhizhu AI's technological strength and market prospects.
Despite facing developmental bottlenecks in the global large model field over the past year, Chinese AI companies have shown considerable competitiveness in certain areas. In technologies such as video generation, companies like Keling, Hailuo, and Jimeng have achieved innovative breakthroughs, propelling rapid development in China's AI industry.
However, in light of the increasingly severe external environment, especially the U.S. sanctions on China's AI industry, the year 2025 will present more challenges for Chinese large model enterprises.
