Z.AI Unveils Cheaper Model Running Entirely on Homegrown Chips

Chinese AI developer Z.AI Co. Ltd. has launched an open-source multimodal model which the company said is trained with less parameters, runs entirely on homegrown chips and offers more affordable API services.

The release highlights a growing trend among Chinese AI model developers to deploy smaller and cheaper models to compete on price, while demonstrating that homegrown processors can handle massive inference workloads with efficiency comparable to that of mainstream Nvidia chips.