This month both Zhipu (also known as Z.ai) and MiniMax made initial public offerings (IPOs) on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX), making them the world’s first two pure-play AI companies to go public. Securities laws generally require companies to submit lengthy prospectuses disclosing information relevant for investors before offering shares to the public. In the cases of Zhipu and MiniMax, these are gold mines of information about not only their corporate fundamentals, but also their views on AI, internal culture, and how they fit into the Chinese AI puzzle.

I spent the past few days with these prospectuses and came out of reading with a plethora of observations and questions. Below are some findings and early thoughts, featuring:

• Zhipu’s Model as a Service (MaaS) = SaaS + AI?

• China’s competitive, ever-changing cloud computing landscape;

• AGI is what you want it to be;

• And an early look at how good of a business AI boyfriends are…

What is the product?

Going public requires a company to be very explicit about what they are selling. Here, the two companies diverge the most. Zhipu frames its product strategy around model-as-a-service (MaaS — an acronym which appears 96 times in the prospectus), while MiniMax has an array of diverse products that consumers are already familiar with, from chatbots and video generation platforms to its signature companion app Talkie/Xingye. But MiniMax, self-reportedly, also wants to deliver “technology as products.”

MaaS customers buy access to the AI model, rather than products built on top of, or outputs generated by, the model. In other words, this emphasis on MaaS tries to turn the pure-play AI market into a kind of (mostly B2B) SaaS, with API calls at the center.

The impulse to constantly assert that the technology itself is the product is an interesting one. Both Zhipu and MiniMax are eager to describe themselves as foundation-model companies first, even if they have more specific application products that are clearly profitable (in the case of MiniMax). Is this a move to persuade investors to support costly R&D? Or to gain credibility as frontier labs in a hostile Western-dominated landscape? Or is it both?

Who’s buying from them?

We learn from Zhipu’s prospectus that it considers the public sector to be a significant source of revenue. It has particularly courted the telecommunications sector, which is heavily dominated by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China. Of all the ...