The author emphasizes that Z.ai is fundamentally good at building models — likely more compute-efficient than American labs — and that access to Tsinghua's deep pool of computer scientists is a central contributor, not distillation alone. ✦ AI generated
SemiAnalysis (article author) · Interconnects · 2026-08-14 · original ↗
Z.ai is an extremely skilled LLM organization – one that is likely far more compute efficient than OpenAI / Anthropic. This needs repeating. These folks are very good at what they do. The company has very close ties to Tsinghua University, which is home to many of the best Chinese computer scientists. This abundant, eager talent pool is as central to their success as it is for any Western counterpart.
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