China's Zhipu CEO Challenges Musk on AI Race Timeline

Tang Jie, CEO of China's leading AI startup Zhipu, believes China is not months behind America in the race for frontier AI models. This prediction came during a social media exchange with Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk initially suggested China would launch an AI model to rival Anthropic's Fable 5 in the first quarter. Tang Jie responded, "won't take that long," indicating it would be sooner. He stated the Chinese rival is closer than Musk thinks. Musk countered that true usefulness is different from benchmark performance, noting Anthropic's focus on "maximizing useful intelligence" shows up in revenue. Tang Jie replied that focus on what intelligence truly is, is all that's needed. Zhipu, formerly Z.ai, recently released its GLM-5.2 AI model. Benchmarks show GLM-5.2 performs almost as well as Anthropic’s Opus 4.7 to 4.8 and has reportedly outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. GLM-5.2 is an open-source model with no usage restrictions. This model, a 744-billion-parameter model, ranked second globally in front-end coding rankings. Zhipu is now the world's third-ranked lab by Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. This exchange highlights the ongoing debate about the AI gap between the US and China, which has implications for global technological leadership.