Over the weekend, AI enthusiasts were abuzz with speculation about who was behind Ox Alpha, a new, highly capable open-source model that has been making waves in the industry. According to Bloomberg, it’s none other than GLM-maker Z.ai. The company confirmed that Ox Alpha is part of its latest GLM series, which includes models that have previously outperformed those from Hugging Face and OpenAI.

Z.ai plans to release the model’s weights on Wednesday, allowing developers to build upon this new iteration. Described as a reasoning model suited for complex software engineering tasks, Ox Alpha aims to handle long-horizon software projects, complex reasoning, and workflows that require text with visual context.

The release of Ox Alpha adds another player to the growing list of cheap yet capable models from China, potentially posing a significant threat to more expensive AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Earlier this month, Z.ai also released GLM-5.3, which rivals Anthropic’s Fable 5 in certain benchmarks.

The tech world is watching closely as these developments unfold, wondering what the future holds for artificial intelligence and market dynamics.