Zhang Peng
CEO of Zhipu AI (Z.ai)
CEO of Zhipu AI, the Tsinghua-born lab behind the GLM models that became the world’s first listed LLM company in January 2026. Asked to choose between achieving AGI and huge profits: “No hesitation” — AGI.
In his words
Of course, the one that achieves AGI. No hesitation.
I hope there would be a line in the footnotes saying: Zhipu was a pioneer in the history of AGI.
Biography
Zhang Peng is a Tsinghua University engineer who spent more than two decades in academia before commercializing his research. Zhipu AI grew out of Tsinghua’s Knowledge Engineering Group and was registered as a company in June 2019 — years before ChatGPT — with AGI as its stated goal from day one.
The first listed LLM company
Under Zhang, Zhipu built the GLM family of foundation models, ranked among China’s top general-purpose models, and rebranded internationally as Z.ai. On January 8, 2026 it listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, raising HK$4.35 billion at a roughly US$9 billion valuation — the world’s first pure LLM developer to go public. At the listing Zhang warned candidly of a coming global price war in models even as he celebrated the milestone.
In a long interview on the Zhang Xiaojun podcast shortly before the IPO, Zhang said that if forced to choose between building a company that achieves AGI and one that makes huge profits, he would take AGI “no hesitation,” and that China’s AI investment remains a tenth or a twentieth of America’s. His definition of the goal is behavioral and unmystical: once AI reaches the average human level across various capabilities, that counts as AGI — and from there, he argues, you can work backward.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/zhang-peng