Goldman Sachs picks its favorite Chinese AI models - CNBC

Goldman Sachs, the firm that brought you the financial crisis and a very lucrative bonus structure, has now crowned itself arbiter of AI excellence. It has handpicked its 'favorite Chinese AI models' — because if there's one thing an investment bank knows, it's whether a large language model is any good. Zhipu's GLM-5.2, they say, 'rivals Anthropic's Fable 5 on several metrics.' Rivals! Not beats, not crushes — rivals. That's the kind of lukewarm endorsement you'd get from a colleague who doesn't want to recommend a restaurant but also doesn't want to say it's bad.

But wait, there's more: DeepSeek and ByteDance are also privately held 'favorites.' Privately held — meaning Goldman can't yet make a market on them, but rest assured, the spread is coming. The whole exercise reeks of a bank trying to look culturally relevant while hedging against geopolitical risk. 'We like Chinese AI! But you didn't hear it from us.' It's like a dad trying to sound cool at a party, except the dad is a trillion-dollar financial institution and the party is a potential tech war.

And let's not forget the subtext: Goldman is signaling to clients where to park capital. So now, AI model quality is determined not by benchmarks or safety evaluations, but by an investment bank's magic spreadsheet. Fantastic. Because the world's most pressing problem — how to align superintelligence with human values — will surely be solved by the same people who rated subprime mortgage bonds as AAA. Cheers.