Goldman Sachs has identified three top Chinese artificial intelligence models, with only one publicly traded: Zhipu, also known as Knowledge Atlas. On Friday, the investment bank initiated coverage for the Hong Kong-listed Zhipu, setting a price target of 1,880 Hong Kong dollars ($239.83), indicating almost a 15% gain potential from the stock’s closing price that day. Zhipu has experienced significant growth since its listing in January, largely attributed to the rising interest in its open-sourced GLM-5.2 model, which is seen as a strong competitor to Anthropic’s Fable 5.
Analysts from Goldman Sachs noted that Zhipu’s GLM-5.2 model has achieved near-frontier performance, leading to increased adoption among domestic enterprises and global small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs). They believe that the model’s usage by developers will facilitate ongoing upgrades and help Zhipu maintain its leading position within the Chinese enterprise sector. While the analysts assigned a neutral rating to Zhipu, they also highlighted two other preferred Chinese AI companies—Deepseek and ByteDance—both of which remain privately held.
Their assessment considered multiple criteria, including market entry speed, valuation, and AI capabilities. Notably, ByteDance excelled in AI video generation. Zhipu and Deepseek generally outperformed models from major players like Alibaba and Tencent, particularly in terms of rapid market entry and performance metrics. In recent trading, Zhipu shares surged 70% over the last 60 days, while Minimax plummeted over 70%. Analysts emphasized the growing importance of China’s open-source AI models as they approach the performance levels of global proprietary models, underlined by regulatory factors in US and China markets.
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