Goldman Sachs recommends three Chinese-made artificial intelligence models, only one of which is publicly traded. The investment bank initiated coverage on Hong Kong-listed Shibaura, also known as Knowledge Atlas, on Friday, with a price target of HK$1,880 ($239.83). This represents an increase of nearly 15% from the stock’s closing price that day. The company has soared since it went public in Hong Kong in January. The company’s open source GLM-5.2 model is believed to be comparable to Anthropic’s Fable 5 on several metrics, and has received more attention in recent weeks. “As the latest GLM5.2 model has almost reached frontier performance, and its adoption by domestic enterprises and global small and medium-sized enterprises has increased significantly, we believe that the widespread use by programmers will enable Zhipu to maintain further model upgrades at a high frequency, thereby solidifying its leading position in China’s enterprise/coding,” the analyst said. A separate report released by Goldman on Friday said that while they initiated coverage of the stock with a neutral rating, two other Chinese AI model companies they prioritize are DeepSeek and ByteDance, both of which are privately held. Analysts evaluated models based on factors such as time to market, arena score, valuation, and pricing. The study also included AI video generation capabilities, for which ByteDance is ideal. According to the Goldman report, Zhipu’s GLM and DeepSeek models generally outperform those of Alibaba, Tencent, and MiniMax, especially in terms of time to market and arena scores. In the past 60 business days on the Hong Kong market, Chipu stock has soared 70%, while Minimax has fallen more than 70%. Alibaba fell nearly 10% and Tencent fell about 5%. Analysts said, “China’s AI open source/open weight model is reaching a critical point in intelligence performance compared to the world’s proprietary models.” “Agentic AI is driving explosive demand for these valuable models at the low end. Access to computing will be the driving factor, where US/China regulations, balance sheets, and inference efficiency will be key,” the analysts said. —CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.
