Bio

Tang Jie is a Chinese computer scientist, born in 1977. He is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University, the co-founder and chief scientist of Z.AI (formerly Zhipu AI), and the principal academic figure behind the GLM-130B foundation model and the open-weights ChatGLM family. He concurrently directs the Foundation Model Research Center at Tsinghua's AI Institute and serves as a vice director of the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence. As of May 2026 he leads the Z.AI research effort following the company's January 2026 Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing.

Education

Tang completed his doctorate in computer science at Tsinghua University in 2006. The early degrees that preceded the PhD have not been documented in English-language sources.

Career

Tang's career has been concentrated at Tsinghua University, where he has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology since the mid-2000s. In March 2006 he launched AMiner, an academic search and social-network analysis platform that has since grown to over 30 million users across more than 220 countries and regions. The AMiner system uses semantic mining of researcher profiles, citations, and collaboration networks and remains one of the most widely used academic-discovery tools developed in China.

He co-founded Z.AI, then known as Zhipu AI, on 11 June 2019 at Tsinghua University Science Park in the Zhongguancun district of Beijing, alongside Li Juanzi. The company was incubated within the Tsinghua Knowledge Engineering Group that Tang has led for two decades and grew out of GLM and AMiner research projects. Zhang Peng, formerly the deputy director of the Science and Technology Big Data Research Center at Tsinghua's Institute of Data Science, joined as chief executive officer.

Through 2022 and 2023, Tang's research group at Tsinghua published GLM-130B, a 130-billion-parameter bilingual general language model accepted at ICLR 2023, and the open-source ChatGLM-6B model. ChatGLM-6B reached the top of the Hugging Face trending charts and remained there for three consecutive weeks following its open-source release, an early signal of demand for permissively licensed Chinese-English bilingual models. The CogView and CogVideo image and video generation lines, and the CodeGeeX code generation series, followed under his research direction.

Z.AI completed its initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January 2026, becoming the first major Chinese large-language-model company to list publicly. Press coverage at the time noted that effective control of the company sits with Tang and Chairman Liu Debing, who together hold approximately thirty-seven percent of voting rights.

Notable contributions

Tang's body of work spans academic-search infrastructure, large-scale pre-trained language models, and the open-weights GLM lineage that anchors Z.AI's research output.

• AMiner (March 2006). Academic search and social-network analysis platform with over thirty million users.
• GLM-130B (October 2022, ICLR 2023). Bilingual 130-billion-parameter general language model and a foundation of the GLM lineage.
• ChatGLM-6B (March 2023). Open-source conversational model that topped Hugging Face trending charts for three weeks at release.
• CogView and CogVideo. Image and video generation models from his Tsinghua group.
• CodeGeeX. Code generation model series.
• P-Tuning v2 prompt-tuning method.
• Honors. ACM Fellow, AAAI Fellow, IEEE Fellow, NSFC Distinguished Young Scholar.

Affiliations

• Tsinghua University: Professor, Department of Computer Science and Technology, since the mid-2000s; Director of the Foundation Model Research Center, AI Institute.
• Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI): Vice Director.
• Z.AI (formerly Zhipu AI): Co-founder and Chief Scientist, June 2019 to present.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, Tang is the academic anchor of one of the largest Chinese frontier AI labs and the figure most commonly cited in Western coverage as the architect of the GLM lineage. He has mentored a substantial cohort of Chinese AI researchers, including Yang Zhilin of Moonshot AI, whom he advised during Yang's Tsinghua undergraduate research period.

Z.AI's positioning in 2025 and 2026 has been distinct from peer Chinese frontier labs in two ways. First, the company's open-weights orientation extends across the GLM and ChatGLM lines and has been a structural commitment from Tang's academic period rather than a recent strategic shift. Second, the January 2026 Hong Kong listing makes Z.AI the first major Chinese LLM company on a public exchange, ahead of MiniMax, which followed the same month, and ahead of Moonshot AI and DeepSeek, which remain privately held.

Sources

• Jie Tang. Wikipedia biographical entry covering Tsinghua, AMiner, the GLM and ChatGLM model lines, and the Z.AI co-founding.
• Jie Tang Tsinghua homepage. Personal academic homepage in the Knowledge Engineering Group.
• Jie Tang Google Scholar. Google Scholar profile with publication and citation records.
• Jie Tang on X / Twitter. Public posts on Z.AI research and GLM model releases.
• Z.AI Wikipedia entry. Company overview including ownership structure and the January 2026 Hong Kong listing.
• GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model. The October 2022 ICLR 2023 paper introducing the 130-billion-parameter bilingual general language model.