When it went public in Hong Kong, Z.ai said it planned to use most of the money to improve its models, largely by acquiring more chips. A few weeks after the stock listing, Z.ai said it was looking for partners to share computing power resources and apologized after users complained about slow service.

“Open models are a powerful distribution strategy, but they are not a complete business model,” said Wei Sun, a principal A.I. analyst at Counterpoint Research in Beijing. “An I.P.O. can finance the next training cycle, but it cannot by itself create sustainable economics.”