I tried China's buzzy free AI. The wait was painful, but the answers impressed me. - Business Insider

Ah, Z.ai's GLM-5.2, the Chinese open-source model that Goldman Sachs already anointed as a favourite. Now a Business Insider reporter has actually tried it, and the verdict is... it might be good, if you've got a few hours to kill. The wait was 'painful,' they say, but the answers 'impressed.' A 1 million-token context window sounds impressive until you realise you need a small nuclear reactor to run the thing locally.

The model is free, of course, because nothing says 'disruptive innovation' like giving away state-of-the-art capability and hoping someone else figures out the monetisation. Z.ai is the latest in a proud tradition of labs that treat AGI as a loss leader. The comparisons to DeepSeek are inevitable, though DeepSeek at least had the decency to charge for its API.

But here's the rub: the 'painful' wait time is the elephant in the server rack. If inference is this slow now, what happens when everyone and their GPU-poor startup tries to use it? The bubble of promise meets the wall of latency. Still, the answers impress, and that's all that matters in the court of hype. Another Chinese model, another round of breathless coverage. Same as it ever was.