Startups go public in litmus test for Chinese AI

Leading Chinese artificial intelligence startup Zhipu AI has went public Thursday, followed a day later by rival MiniMax in a litmus test for the country's rapidly developing sector.

Zhipu AI, or Z.ai, was founded in 2019 and is a major provider of large language model chatbots to businesses in the world's second-largest economy. Its market debut in Hong Kong, along with MiniMax's on Friday, comes before any initial public offering announcements from top US startups OpenAI -- the maker of ChatGPT -- and Anthropic, known for its Claude chatbot.