TIME100 AI 2026 · Innovators

Zhang Peng

CEO, Zhipu

He led Zhipu to become the first of China's 'AI tigers' to go public, with a $558 million Hong Kong IPO.

Interesting facts

Before AI
Spent more than two decades at Tsinghua University, from entering as a computer science student in 1998, before founding Zhipu.
gingerriver.com
Side project
At Tsinghua's Knowledge Engineering Lab he led development of AMiner, a system for mining academic research and researcher networks.
baike.baidu.com
Numbers
Zhipu claims its GLM-5.3 model scores 88.2 on Terminal-Bench 2.1, three points ahead of Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8.
time.com
In their words
Joked that if Anthropic charges US$200, Zhipu would charge 200 yuan.
cls.cn
In their words
Says he would choose achieving AGI over making a lot of profit, calling it a long-distance race where you have to persist.
time.com

Researched with Autumn: describe the people you want to understand and get a table with a source on every cell.