China’s AI startup Zhipu releases GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air

Zhipu AI (also known as Z.ai or 智谱AI) is a leading Chinese AI company specializing in large language models and other artificial intelligence technologies. Originating from Tsinghua University, Zhipu AI has attracted major investment from top Chinese tech firms and international backers. By 2024, it was regarded as one of the “AI Tiger” companies in China and is a significant player in the global AI landscape. The company is known for rapidly developing innovative LLMs, releasing open-source models, and building tools focused on agentic and reasoning capabilities.

GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air: Overview

Both GLM-4.5 and its compact sibling, GLM-4.5 Air, are foundation large language models designed for advanced reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks. They mark Zhipu AI’s push to unify general cognitive capabilities and serve as powerful backbones for intelligent agent applications.

GLM-4.5

• Size: 355 billion total parameters, 32 billion active parameters at runtime.

• Core Features:

• • Hybrid Reasoning: Supports a “thinking mode” for tool use and multi-step reasoning (e.g., solving math, code, and logical problems) and a “non-thinking mode” for instant responses.
  • Agent Readiness: Designed for agent-centric workflows, integrating tool-calling natively for seamless automation and coding.
  • Performance:
    • Ranks in top three across many industry benchmarks, comparable to leading models such as Claude 4 Opus and Gemini 2.5 Pro.
    • Particularly excels in mathematics, coding, data analysis, and scientific reasoning—achieving near or at state-of-the-art results in tests like MMLU Pro and AIME24.
    • Demonstrates a high tool-calling success rate (90.6%) and strong coding benchmark performance.
• Context Window: 128,000 tokens.
• Open source: Weights and implementation available for research and commercial use (MIT license condition).

GLM-4.5 Air

• Size: 106 billion total parameters, 12 billion active parameters during inference.
• Design: Lightweight, mixture-of-experts architecture for optimal efficiency and deployment flexibility, including running locally on consumer-grade hardware.
• Same 128K context window as GLM-4.5.

• Hybrid Reasoning & Agentic Capabilities:

• • Maintains strong reasoning and tool-use abilities, a hallmark of the GLM-4.5 family.
  • Offers a balance of performance and resource consumption, making it well suited to cost-sensitive and high-throughput applications.
  • On benchmarks, it scores competitively with other industry-leading models while using far fewer compute resources.

• Use cases: Efficient deployment for enterprise AI assistants, automation, coding support, customer service, and affordable large-scale deployments.

Performance and Accessibility

• Competitive Pricing: API costs are among the lowest on the market, reflecting Zhipu AI’s strategy to undercut competitors and democratize access to advanced AI.
• Open Source Access: Both models are available for free testing and deployment through multiple platforms like Hugging Face, Zhipu AI Open Platform, and third-party APIs.
• Community and Ecosystem: Zhipu AI encourages developer and research engagement, providing technical blogs, documentation, and standard model APIs.

In Summary

• Zhipu AI is a dominant force in China’s rapidly growing AI industry, focusing on high-performance, open-source language models.
• GLM-4.5 is a very large LLM targeting top-tier reasoning, agentic, and coding abilities.
• GLM-4.5 Air offers similar power but much higher efficiency for wider, cost-effective deployment.

These models are part of a new wave of AI technologies enabling more accessible, adaptable, and powerful agentic applications in both research and enterprise settings.