Wanzhi

A free bilingual workspace

Wanzhi (万知) is an AI productivity workspace from the company 01.AI, released on 13 May 2024. It is free to use, works in both Chinese and English, and is available in two forms: on the web and as a WeChat mini program called 万知 AI.^[1] A mini program is a small app that runs inside WeChat, so users can reach the tool without installing anything separate.

What it does

The product gathers a set of everyday office tasks in one place. According to its launch description, these include meeting minutes, weekly reports, writing help, interpretation of financial reports, paper reading, creation of slide decks, and reading of long documents.^[1] It also has real-time internet access, so an answer is not limited to what the underlying model learned during training and can draw on current online material.^[1]

These features are variations on a few basic abilities. Turning a meeting into minutes means condensing a long, messy record into decisions and action items. A weekly report means turning scattered notes into a short structured summary. Reading a long document or a research paper means handling text far longer than a person can hold in mind at once, then answering questions about it or pulling out the parts that matter. Making slides means reorganising written material into an outline and then into pages. Placing them together in one workspace means a user does not have to move text between separate tools for each step.

Where the name comes from

Wanzhi was launched by 01.AI, a company that also builds its own large language models. Wikipedia describes Wanzhi as a free productivity assistant comparable to Microsoft Copilot, with Chinese and English versions.^[2] The comparison is about positioning rather than identical software: Copilot is Microsoft's assistant for office work, while Wanzhi is a standalone, free workspace that a user opens in a browser or inside WeChat.

Offering the product in Chinese and English from the start reflects the audience the company was aiming at: users who read and write in both languages, and who may need to work with English-language papers or reports and produce Chinese output, or the reverse.

From a personal tool to an enterprise platform

The Wanzhi name was later extended beyond the individual user. 01.AI publicly launched the Wanzhi enterprise large-model one-stop platform on 17 March 2025, and at the same time announced customization for enterprises that want to deploy DeepSeek.^[3] The platform also adapts domestic models, including Alibaba's Qwen and 01.AI's own Yi.^[3]

"One-stop" here means that a company does not have to assemble the pieces itself: model access, deployment and the surrounding tooling are offered as a single package. Adapting several models rather than only its own is a practical choice, since different models differ in cost, speed and how well they handle particular kinds of text, and an enterprise customer may already have preferences or existing systems built around one of them. Offering customization for DeepSeek fits the same pattern — the platform is presented as a place to run whichever model fits the job.

Where it sits

The two stages show a common path for assistant products of this period. A free, consumer-facing workspace serves individual users and gathers experience about which tasks people actually bring to a model; an enterprise platform then packages similar abilities for organisations that need to deploy them inside their own systems. For 01.AI, Wanzhi is the application layer built on top of its own models, and the enterprise version widens that layer to include models from other providers as well.^[3]