Zhipu Founder Tang Jie Outlines Touch High Plan Focused on AGI Research

Zhipu founder Tang Jie issued an internal letter describing the company’s view of upcoming competition in artificial general intelligence (AGI) and outlining a plan to prioritize research over short-term commercialization. According to Odaily, Tang said Zhipu will continue what he called a “counterintuitive” approach and launch the “Touch High” plan, maintaining its focus on AGI research rather than near-term business monetization. In the letter, Tang listed four key challenges on the path toward AGI: long-horizon tasks, autonomous agent systems, fully self training, and extreme safety governance. Tang placed particular emphasis on extreme safety governance, saying Zhipu plans to invest resources on the scale of tens of billions to tackle mechanistic interpretability. He described this as clarifying the neuron-level logic behind model decisions and promoting a shift from black-box systems to transparent, interpretable systems.