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Chinese AI start-up Zhipu AI's CEO Zhang Peng speaks at a launch event in Beijing on March 31, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of ZGC Forum

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Zhipu AI unveiled a free AI agent on Monday, in the latest example of what has been described by some industry leaders as "explosive growth" in China's AI industry marked by a rising number of products and technological advancements.

The AI agent, known as AutoGLM, was launched at a side event of the 2025 Zhongguancun Forum in Beijing on Monday. It marks the world's first AI agent capable of both deep research and practical operations, the company said in a press release sent to the Global Times on Monday.

Specifically, AutoGLM is capable of performing complex "thinking" and executing tasks simultaneously, Zhipu AI CEO Zhang Peng said at the launch event, adding that it is capable of opening and browsing web pages like a human being and conducting tasks such as data retrieval, analysis and research report writing.

According to Zhang, the AI agent is based on ZhiPu's self-developed models, including its latest reasoning models GLM-Z1-Air and GLM-4-Air0414. The company said that GLM-Z1-Air is a model that "matches the performance of DeepSeek's R1, while running up to eight times faster and requiring only one-thirtieth of the computing resources of its counterpart."

AutoGLM will become open source on April 14, a move that aims to promote the development of the AI industry ecosystem, according to the company.

The launch of such an AI agent represents a "significant step" toward developing artificial general intelligence, a theoretical term referring to systems that match humans at some intellectual tasks, Liu Gang, chief economist at the Chinese Institute of New Generation AI Development Strategies, told the Global Times on Monday, adding that AI agents are systems designed to make decisions and execute a range of tasks autonomously, showing the future of human-machine collaboration.

The launch follows a surge in Chinese AI products this year. In early March, Beijing-based start-up Monica unveiled Manus, a general AI agent that it claims can make decisions and execute tasks autonomously, with much less prompting required compared with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and DeepSeek, Reuters reported on March 21.

At the launch event on Monday, Zhang from Zhipu AI said that "the year 2025 would be the year of rise of AI agents."

Meanwhile, other industry leaders have also called the year of 2025 the year of "explosive growth" for China's AI industry. For example, Wang Tao, executive director of the board and chairman of the EMT joint management board of Huawei, said on March 20 that in 2025, the world will officially usher in the first year of AI intelligent agents and AI reasoning has seen "explosive growth," according to a report on chinanews.com.

China's user base of generative AI products has reached 300 million, with more than 120 million monthly active users, the report said.

"As AI agents continue to evolve, they are expected to play a crucial role in various industries, from finance to healthcare, by enhancing productivity and enabling more efficient decision-making," said Liu.