Before it
GLM-4.5 had established Zhipu in the open agentic tier.
The problem
Open models needed both scale and long context to stay relevant.
What it introduced
A very large open MoE with million-token context under MIT.
Why it matters
Another Chinese lab at the open frontier as the Western open ecosystem thinned.
What modern models inherit
A crowded, largely Chinese open frontier.
What came next
Continued competition with Qwen, Kimi and DeepSeek.