Yesterday I had my first conversation (in English) with Zhipu's GLM-4.7. It was cool because I got to talk with an actual Chinese AI about topics like: the representation of Chinese AI in "AI 2027"; representations of AI in the "Culture" SF series versus the "Wandering Earth" movies; consequences of Fast Takeoff; comparisons of China and America in general; and Chinese ideas about AI society and superintelligence. (An aligned Chinese superintelligence might be a heavenly bureaucrat or a Taoist sage.)

It was one of those AI conversations where you know that something really new is happening, and I now consider GLM to be as interesting as the leading American models. (A year ago I also spoke with DeepSeek-r1, but it never grabbed my attention the way that GLM has done.)

So what's the status of the Chinese AI sector? In the same way that in America, AI is pursued by older Internet titans (Google, Meta/Facebook, X-Twitter) as well as by newer companies that specialize in AI (OpenAI, Anthropic), the Chinese AI sector is a mix of big old Internet companies with all the money (Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu) and "AI 2.0" startups (Zhipu, DeepSeek, Moonshot).

Keeping in mind [...]

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.