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
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.
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.
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, seen by the South China Morning Post.
Mainland Chinese technology shares largely slumped on Monday, with the semiconductor sector among the biggest drags on the broader market. The Shanghai Composite Index fell 2.06 per cent, while the Shenzhen Composite, the ChiNext and the SSE Star 50 indexes were all down more than 3 per cent each.