Krux
February 17, 2026
China's Zhipu AI Drops 745B Open-Source Monster Model
Published: February 17, 2026 at 12:25 AM
Updated: February 17, 2026 at 12:25 AM
100-word summary
Zhipu AI just released GLM-5, a massive 745-billion-parameter open-source LLM under MIT license—completely free for commercial use. This Mixture-of-Experts beast uses 256 experts with only 44B active per inference, trained on 28.5 trillion tokens with a 200K context window. It packs DeepSeek Sparse Attention for efficiency and a native Agent Mode that autonomously generates professional documents. Benchmarks show it rivals Gemini 3 Pro on coding tasks and approaches Claude Opus 4.5. As Western AI labs tighten control, China's bet on radical openness could reshape the entire AI development landscape and accelerate global innovation.
What happened
Zhipu AI just released GLM-5, a massive 745-billion-parameter open-source LLM under MIT license—completely free for commercial use. This Mixture-of-Experts beast uses 256 experts with only 44B active per inference, trained on 28.5 trillion tokens with a 200K context window. It packs DeepSeek Sparse Attention for efficiency and a native Agent Mode that autonomously generates professional documents. Benchmarks show it rivals Gemini 3 Pro on coding tasks and approaches Claude Opus 4.5.
Why it matters
As Western AI labs tighten control, China's bet on radical openness could reshape the entire AI development landscape and accelerate global innovation.