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Tang Jie

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Tang Jie (Chinese: 唐杰; born 1977), also published as Jie Tang, is a Chinese computer scientist, a chair professor at Tsinghua University, and the co-founder and chief scientist of Zhipu AI, the Beijing startup behind the GLM and ChatGLM family of large language models. [1][2][3] He is the principal builder of the AMiner academic search and mining system, launched in 2006, and the scientific architect of the GLM pretraining framework that underpins Zhipu's models. [1][3][4] His Google Scholar profile lists more than 77,000 citations, and AMiner data reported an h-index of 103 across over 720 papers as of April 2024. [9][23]

Tang holds the WeBank Chair Professorship in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University and directs the Fundamental Model Research Center at Tsinghua's Institute for Artificial Intelligence. [1][23] He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). [1][6] The GLM effort grew out of Tsinghua's Knowledge Engineering Group (KEG), where Tang has spent most of his research career. [4][5] In January 2026 Zhipu AI became the first major Chinese generative AI startup to list publicly, on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and Tang was identified in regulatory filings as a controlling shareholder and the company's chief scientist. [3][7][8]

Who is Tang Jie?

Tang Jie is a Chinese computer scientist best known for two bodies of work: the AMiner academic search system he has built since 2006, and the GLM large language models he leads as chief scientist of Zhipu AI. [1][3][9] Note the Chinese name order: Tang is the family name and Jie is the given name, so he is also cited in English-language papers as Jie Tang. [1][6] His research spans data mining, social network analysis, knowledge graphs, and, since around 2020, large scale language model pretraining. [1][4]

Education and academic career

Tang received his PhD in computer science and technology from Tsinghua University in 2006, and his doctoral dissertation won the Tsinghua University Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award the same year. [2][9][23] He joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua, where he became a full professor and a member of the Knowledge Engineering Group, a research lab focused on data mining, knowledge management, and the semantic web. [1][2] He now holds the WeBank Chair Professorship and directs the Fundamental Model Research Center at Tsinghua's Institute for Artificial Intelligence. [1][23] His stated research interests include artificial general intelligence, data mining, social networks, machine learning, and knowledge graphs. [1]

Tang has held a series of editorial and program roles in the data mining and web research communities. He served as program committee chair for The Web Conference (WWW) in 2018 and for CIKM in 2016, as program committee chair for WSDM in 2015, and as an executive editor of the journal ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data. [2] He received the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, one of China's principal grants for early career researchers. [1][2] Within China's AI research community he has also served in a leadership capacity at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, a state backed research institute, and he was one of the technical leads on its Wudao large model project. [4][10]

What is AMiner?

AMiner is an academic search and social network mining system, formerly known as ArnetMiner, that Tang has built and led since 2006. [9][11] The system was launched in March 2006 and indexes researchers, publications, citations, and collaboration networks, then applies mining algorithms to model academic influence and expertise. [9][11] By the mid 2020s AMiner described an index of more than 130 million researcher profiles and more than 200 million papers, with users drawn from over 220 countries and regions. [1][11] The underlying paper, "ArnetMiner: Extraction and Mining of Academic Social Networks," published at the ACM SIGKDD conference in 2008, received the SIGKDD Test of Time Award for Applied Science in 2020, a recognition given to work whose impact has lasted about ten years. [6][12]

Network and knowledge mining

Much of Tang's earlier research concerns extracting structured knowledge from large heterogeneous networks. His ACM Fellow citation credits contributions to information and social network mining, and his IEEE Fellow citation credits contributions to knowledge discovery from data and social network mining. [6] This line of work covers topics such as influence analysis in social networks, expert finding, name disambiguation across large bibliographic datasets, and representation learning on graphs, with the AMiner platform serving as both a product and a testbed for the methods. [1][9]

What is the GLM pretraining framework?

From around 2020 Tang's group at Tsinghua turned to large scale language model pretraining. The group developed the General Language Model, or GLM, a pretraining approach based on autoregressive blank infilling that is designed to handle both natural language understanding and generation tasks within one framework. [4][13] GLM became the architectural basis for the models that Zhipu AI later released. The group scaled the approach to a 130 billion parameter bilingual model, GLM-130B, described in the paper "GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model," which lists Tang among its 18 authors and was accepted at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in 2023. [13] The paper frames the model as "an attempt to open-source a 100B-scale model at least as good as GPT-3 (davinci)," trained for English and Chinese and released as open source weights for research and commercial use. [13][14]

GLM and ChatGLM models

The GLM family expanded into a set of conversational and multimodal systems associated with Tsinghua KEG and Zhipu AI. [4][15] Following the public attention on dialogue systems in late 2022, the group built aligned chat models on top of GLM. ChatGLM-6B, a six billion parameter bilingual dialogue model, was open sourced in 2023 and was downloaded a large number of times, which helped popularize the line among Chinese developers. [1][15] Subsequent releases included larger and more capable systems, summarized in the paper "ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools," published in 2024, which traces the lineage from GLM-130B through GLM-4. [15] GLM-4 was released in June 2024, and later iterations such as GLM-4.5 and GLM-5 followed under the Zhipu and Z.ai brands. [15][16] On the day of Zhipu's Hong Kong listing Tang signaled the imminent release of GLM-5, which the company shipped on 11 February 2026. [16][17][24] The group also produced related open models for code and for image and video generation, including CodeGeeX, CogView, and CogVideo. [1]

What is Tang Jie's role at Zhipu AI?

Zhipu AI traces its origin to June 2019, when a company was spun out of Tsinghua's Knowledge Engineering Group and the AMiner project. [3][4] It was co-founded by Tang Jie and Li Juanzi, both professors in Tsinghua's Department of Computer Science and Technology, and the legal entity is registered in Beijing as Zhipu Huazhang, marketed overseas as Z.ai and presented in filings under the name Knowledge Atlas Technology. [3][4][8] In its early period the firm concentrated on knowledge graphs and academic AI before shifting its focus to large language models. [4]

Tang serves as the company's chief scientist, with responsibility for model architecture and long range research direction, while Zhang Peng leads the company as chief executive. [4][8] IPO filings name Tang Jie, alongside chairman Liu Debing and parties acting in concert, as the controlling shareholders of the company. [7][8] On the day of the Hong Kong listing, Tang issued an internal letter calling for a renewed focus on foundational model research and announcing GLM-5. [16][17] In that letter he wrote that "only theories, technologies, or products that have real users can become significant milestones on the road to AGI," and that "GLM-5 will soon meet everyone." [16][24] Tang is also widely credited as a mentor to a cohort of Chinese AI founders, among them Yang Zhilin of the rival startup Moonshot AI. [4]

Position among Chinese frontier labs

Zhipu AI is frequently grouped with a small set of well funded Chinese large model startups, sometimes called the AI tigers or, in Chinese coverage, the six little dragons. [3][18] The company had raised on the order of 1.5 billion US dollars, equivalent to about 8.36 billion yuan, across multiple rounds before its public listing, with a 2023 valuation reported near 2.8 billion US dollars. [7][19] Reported investors include large Chinese technology firms and funds such as Alibaba, Ant Group, Tencent, Meituan, and Xiaomi, the venture firm HongShan, and Middle Eastern backers including Saudi Aramco's Prosperity7 Ventures. [7][19] The firm has also drawn capital from Chinese state linked investors, including a financing from Shanghai state funds in 2025. [20]

In January 2025 the United States Department of Commerce added Zhipu AI and several affiliated entities to its export control Entity List, restricting their access to certain US technology, as part of a broader action against Chinese firms tied to advanced computing. [21][22] The company said it strongly disagreed with the decision, called the listing without factual basis, and stated that it did not expect a substantial impact on its operations. [21][22]

When did Zhipu AI go public?

Zhipu listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under stock code 2513 and began trading on 8 January 2026. [7][17] The offering raised roughly 558 million US dollars, about 4.3 billion Hong Kong dollars, at an issue price of 116.2 Hong Kong dollars per share, and valued the company at about 6.6 billion US dollars. [7][8][17] The Hong Kong public tranche was oversubscribed about 1,159 times, the stock rose in its debut, and coverage described Zhipu as the first major Chinese generative AI company, and one of the first dedicated AGI focused foundation model companies in the world, to go public. [7][8][17]

What awards has Tang Jie received?

Tang has been elected a Fellow of three major professional societies in computing and artificial intelligence. He was named an IEEE Fellow in 2021, an ACM Fellow in 2022, and an AAAI Fellow in 2023. [6] He received the ACM SIGKDD Test of Time Award in 2020 for the ArnetMiner work and has held the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars. [1][6][12] His Google Scholar profile lists more than 77,000 citations, and AMiner data reported an h-index of 103 across over 720 publications as of April 2024. [9][23] Following Zhipu AI's public listing, financial press reporting estimated his personal net worth in the billions of US dollars based on his stake in the company. [9]

Selected facts

FieldDetail
Full nameTang Jie (唐杰), published as Jie Tang
Born1977
NationalityChinese
FieldsData mining, social networks, knowledge graphs, large language models
InstitutionTsinghua University, Department of Computer Science and Technology
TitleWeBank Chair Professor; Director, Fundamental Model Research Center, Institute for AI
Research groupKnowledge Engineering Group (KEG)
PhDTsinghua University, 2006
Citations77,000+ (Google Scholar); h-index 103 (AMiner, April 2024)
Known forAMiner; GLM and ChatGLM models; co-founding Zhipu AI
CompanyZhipu AI (Z.ai), co-founder and chief scientist
Society fellowshipsIEEE Fellow (2021), ACM Fellow (2022), AAAI Fellow (2023)
Major awardACM SIGKDD Test of Time Award (2020)

See also

References

  1. Jie Tang. "Jie Tang (Tang, Jie)'s Homepage," Knowledge Engineering Group, Tsinghua University. https://keg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/jietang/ ↩
  2. "唐杰," Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. https://www.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/info/1111/3486.htm ↩
  3. "Chinese AI tiger Zhipu edges towards Hong Kong listing expected to raise US$300 million," South China Morning Post, December 2025. https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3337171/chinese-ai-tiger-zhipu-edges-towards-hong-kong-listing-expected-raise-us300-million ↩
  4. "Zhipu AI: The Rise of an AI Tiger Reaching for AGI," Turing Post. https://www.turingpost.com/p/zhipu ↩
  5. "Zhipu AI's Rise: From Tsinghua Lab to China's First Foundation Model IPO," Pandaily. https://pro.pandaily.com/p/zhipu-ais-rise-from-tsinghua-lab ↩
  6. "Jie Tang," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jie_Tang ↩
  7. "China Artificial Intelligence Startup Zhipu AI Plans Hong Kong in 2026," Caproasia, December 2025. https://www.caproasia.com/2025/12/19/china-artificial-intelligence-startup-zhipu-ai-plans-hong-kong-in-2026-after-pre-filing-for-ipo-in-2025-april-raised-1-5-billion-in-funding-since-founding-2023-valuation-at-2-8-billion-investors/ ↩
  8. "China's AI Firm Zhipu Climbs in Debut, Lagging Hardware Peers," Bloomberg, January 2026. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-07/china-s-openai-rival-zhipu-debuts-in-hk-after-558-million-ipo ↩
  9. "Jie Tang," Google Scholar profile. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=n1zDCkQAAAAJ&hl=en ↩
  10. "Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence," overview. https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/baai ↩
  11. "AMiner," Knowledge Engineering Group, Tsinghua University. https://www.aminer.org/ ↩
  12. "Prof. Jie Tang and his Team from Tsinghua CS win ACM SIGKDD 2020 Test of Time Award for Applied Science," Tsinghua University. https://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/info/1245/5369.htm ↩
  13. Aohan Zeng et al. "GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model," ICLR 2023, arXiv:2210.02414. https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.02414 ↩
  14. "GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-Trained Model," GitHub repository. https://github.com/zai-org/GLM-130B ↩
  15. "ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools," arXiv:2406.12793. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12793 ↩
  16. "Zhipu was listed today, and Tang Jie's internal letter emphasized a full return to fundamental model research," Futu News, January 2026. https://news.futunn.com/en/post/67090241/zhipu-was-listed-today-and-tang-jie-s-internal-letter ↩
  17. "4 key takeaways: Zhipu becomes first Chinese AI firm to go public, warns of global price war," CGTN, January 2026. https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-01-09/4-key-takeaways-Zhipu-becomes-first-Chinese-AI-firm-to-go-public-1JN0K7CEJaw/p.html ↩
  18. "Four Chinese AI startups to watch beyond DeepSeek," MIT Technology Review, February 2025. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/04/1110942/four-chinese-ai-startups-deepseek/ ↩
  19. "China's Zhipu AI Secures $140 Million Investment From Shanghai State Funds Amid IPO Push," Caixin Global, July 2025. https://www.caixinglobal.com/2025-07-03/chinas-zhipu-ai-secures-140-million-investment-from-shanghai-state-funds-amid-ipo-push-102337464.html ↩
  20. "Zhipu AI raises $140m from Shanghai state funds ahead of IPO," DealStreetAsia, July 2025. https://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/zhipu-ai-shanghai-state-funds-447792 ↩
  21. "Tech war: US adds Chinese AI unicorn Zhipu to trade blacklist before Biden's exit," South China Morning Post, January 2025. https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3295002/tech-war-us-adds-chinese-ai-unicorn-zhipu-trade-blacklist-bidens-exit ↩
  22. "Chinese firm Zhipu expresses strong opposition to addition to US export control entity list," Global Times, January 2025. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202501/1326995.shtml ↩
  23. "Jie Tang," Baidu Baike (English). https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Jie%20Tang/648478 ↩
  24. "LatePost Exclusive: Zhipu Goes Public, Tang Jie's Internal Letter Calls for Full Return to Foundational Model Research," Bitget News, January 2026. https://www.bitget.com/news/detail/12560605135741 ↩

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