degentrading
Former TradFi Options Market Maker, Delegate at Lido DAO
MiniMax should draw renewed attention because it will likely release another model soon. Chinese AI labs are probably quite close to each other in progress, yet their valuations are far apart, so attention should rotate back to MiniMax sooner or later. It is also further down the dilution path than Zhipu. x.comÂ
MiniMax should still perform well as the rise of sovereign AI makes tradeable open-source model makers more attractive than ever, and its stock has fully retraced. The maker of GLM 5.2 has risen about 500%, Elon Musk has said GLM models will likely catch up with frontier models, and Anthropic banning Fable adds to the sovereign AI push. x.comÂ
Zhipu AI is a Chinese AI arbitrage, shipping models near frontier Western performance at a fraction of the valuation. Its GLM-5.1 scored 45.3 on a coding benchmark versus 47.9 for Claude Opus 4.6, a 2.6-point gap far smaller than the valuation gap. Zhipu is up 357% since its January IPO, double MiniMax's return, yet both trade at about $40B. x.comÂ
Zhipu and MiniMax need money, trading at 500-1,000x price to sales, and that could eventually push Chinese AI labs toward closed source. They could privately supply their latest models to Microsoft Azure and neoclouds such as Together, Venice and OpenRouter, which would fine-tune or serve them and share revenue while the weights stay private. x.com x.com x.comÂ
Zhipu AI stands to gain as AI models commoditize and results hinge on engineering, where Chinese companies are strong. A model's effectiveness is model times engineering times compute; China cannot yet beat GPT's base models, but engineering in coding is becoming more important and masks model advantages. As models commoditize, Chinese models catching up through engineering and reputation is inevitable, and a breakthrough "Seedance moment" in coding could come soon. x.com x.com x.com x.comÂ
Zhipu AI's stock is unattractive because the Chinese AI model space is simply too competitive to be an appealing investment. Its company vision still deserves respect, and its current valuation is not a bubble. x.comÂ
China could crash the US stock market with free AI rather than tariffs. Its open models are near-frontier, up to 33x cheaper and already handle more tokens than US models. This is model-dumping, the same playbook China used in solar, EVs and batteries. x.comÂ
Zhipu (Knowledge Atlas) is already valued at nutty levels. At HK$2,094, buying it on $1B of ARR is like paying $6T for Anthropic on $50B of ARR. Its GLM models are genuinely impressive, but that valuation comes before factoring in the headaches of owning Chinese stocks. x.comÂ
Alibaba raising capital for AI after a strong quarter is a buying opportunity, especially with CEO Eddie Wu buying shares right after the raise. In June, heavy buybacks near $94.80 preceded a rally to $132. Stanley Druckenmiller starting a Baidu position, despite saying he would not invest in China under Xi, signals a bet on Chinese AI and cloud. Chinese names are cheap and underappreciated, with strong AI models, power access and robotics leadership, while the US faces data-center hurdles. … Show more
ASML may have topped, since semicap thrives on shortage and would be hit hardest in an overbuild. Then earnings acceleration from memory and fab projects stops or reverses; the labs' leading-edge chase may be at its apex, positioning is bullish and the moat is threatened. Bullishness on Korean, US and Taiwan fab projects makes sense for now. But if the cycle top is confirmed and labs change how they chase the frontier, or token deflation kills some labs, the shortage can end sooner. x.com x.com … Show more
