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Discussion Sentiment

71% Positive

Analyzed from 8446 words in the discussion.

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#models#model#flash#glm#don#more#chinese#same#opus#nvidia

Discussion (329 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

mmastracabout 6 hours ago
Weights on HF here: https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-5.3-Flash

I decided to take the plunge and get myself four sparks at a decent price (and bought the QSFP cables from AliExpress because they are literally 1/2 the price of Amazon), even knowing Apple was going to release new hardware and there's probably a spark 2 on the horizon. It looks like this is going to be a decent fit for what I need. I've been experimenting with a two-node DS4 and it's _good_ at some tasks, but it really just spins its wheels when it hits the limit of what it can reason through.

I can offload mundane/basic tasks to DS4 on two sparks, but I've been pushing it harder on some novel work and it just can't run on its own at all beyond a certain complexity level.

I would love to see an Opus-4.8-level local model but TBH I just haven't got there yet. The models I've tried so far _are_ good but they aren't able to solve tough technical challenges, regardless of harness/prompting/etc.

comandillosabout 2 hours ago
I am surprised. I've been using DS4 Flash (0731) for weeks now and it works perfectly fine as a replacement for Claude in a large variety of cases. It requires a few more iterations, sure, but it's useful enough to not need a Claude subscription anymore. Among the things I do I've been reverse engineering, writing complex C++ code...
badatnamesabout 2 hours ago
DS4 Flash absolutely kicks ass for reverse engineering and bug hunting. Almost no point in considering paying for a bigger model, although it's possible the stuff I've fed it (wide variety of older DOS/Windows stuff and device firmwares) might be easier targets.
comandillosabout 2 hours ago
I've been reverse engineering LEON3-FT SPARC v8 BE code, so I wouldn't say it's common :D. When attached to Ghidra through a MCP the things you can do with this are simply crazy.
metadatabout 4 hours ago
Qwen 3.8 27B is around Opus 4.8 level of capability on the Agentic Intelligence Index (52 vs 57). In my testing the locally hosted Qwen is good enough that looking at a given piece of work output I couldn't tell you which model was behind it.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/qwen3-8-27b?models=gpt-...

Jeremy1026about 2 hours ago
I gave Qwen 3.8 27B and Opus 4.8 the same task in the same codebase. They both came up with the same diff. It wasn't a particularly challenging task (removing a feature flag and updating applicable specs), but it was character for character.
DetroitThrowabout 3 hours ago
Lately I've been throwing tasks at Qwen and a frontier or recently-frontier model (as well as Kimi, GLM, etc) and the smaller parameter models are not really comparable to Opus when it comes to making intelligent decisions about greyer areas of good software architecture.

Amazing results for open weight and that size, but a really long way off, and I'm extremely skeptical of benchmarks that show these smaller models as being anywhere close to Opus 4.8 (or even earlier Opus's).

zerdabout 2 hours ago
I’ve been doing the same thing, giving the same tasks to Qwen 3.8 27B and Opus, and the main difference is that Qwen does not consider edge cases which Opus catches. It’s good at the happy path, but even when hinting that there are uncovered edge cases and gotchas it’s oblivious to it. So I feel like I need a bigger model to do planning/review.
Implicatedabout 3 hours ago
As a counter to that - I've tried various flavors/quants/full weights and Qwen 3.8 27B has been entirely useless at anything non-trivial. Sure - it can do some boilerplate work (though, even armed with a well written spec and working within a very well known framework it went off the rails and did things in a way that were... um... questionable at best) but I don't see it as anything more than a personal assistant style model. Zero chance I'd "work" with it, I spent days trying to get it to do something for me that was usable that I didn't have to have reviewed and refined by a frontier level model or myself. Couldn't do it. The idea that qwen 3.8 27b is _anywhere near_ Opus 4.8 is laughable. Pure benchmaxxing.

DS4 Flash 0731, on the other hand, wildly opposite experience. Would recommend.

GLM 5.2 - even quanted down to a hybrid 4/3 bit setup is amazing for everything but the hardest/most complex stuff in the same projects/realm.

skohanabout 3 hours ago
I've had the exact opposite experience. I've been using 3.8 for my daily driver since last week, and I've gradually been giving it more and more complex tasks as it continues to deliver high quality results. Now I am basically handing off large complex features, and 3.8 is doing the planning, task breakdown, implementation and review with just a few notes from my side.

The tradeoff is time (especially on RDMA4 hardware) - it does take a long time and spend a lot of tokens to get to the result, but I've found I can trust the results enough that I can queue a lot of work, essentially have it running all the time and achieve a decent velocity.

It's the first small local model I've felt like I can do real work with.

disiplusabout 5 hours ago
I will give it a try, but from the benchmarks it never exceeds the DS4 flash benchmarks by significant margin and And I feel that the throughput that you will get on those machines or what I'm getting with my local hosted flash will be so much worse that it's not worth it.
djfobbz35 minutes ago
How much did you drop on these 4 sparks?
mmastrac23 minutes ago
Sparks + cables + 10g SFP+ came out to ~$21,500 CAD
kilroy123about 6 hours ago
> get myself four sparks at a decent price

Wow, if you don't mind me asking. How and where?

mmastracabout 6 hours ago
I bought 4x Asus GX10 with the 1TB option. I don't understand why, but it's the only model in the whole lineup that isn't priced insanely.

They were briefly on sale with a $200-off coupon, but they show up on warehouse deals from time-to-time as well.

swiftcoderabout 6 hours ago
> it's the only model in the whole lineup that isn't priced insanely

$4,000 isn't priced insanely? ye gads

bmurphy1976about 6 hours ago
~$4000 USD each on Amazon, $175 for the cable.
ycui7about 3 hours ago
because it has 1T ssd not 4T
cmrdporcupineabout 5 hours ago
I mean, I have the same machine and the pricing is only what it is because it has that 1TB nVME in it instead of larger. nVME prices are insane and have been for months.

Reality is on a single spark I'm constantly running out of room and it being an odd size M.2 slot it's a pain to upgrade. I'm setting up a NAS over RDMA via ConnectX though, that's fun.

Aurornisabout 5 hours ago
> I would love to see an Opus-4.8-level local model but TBH I just haven't got there yet. The models I've tried so far _are_ good but they aren't able to solve tough technical challenges, regardless of harness/prompting/etc.

Agree. It doesn’t even have to be local, using models in this size class through OpenRouter will reveal their limits if you work side by side with Opus level models regularly.

There are a lot of social media posts about people cancelling their Anthropic or ChatGPT subscriptions after installing a local LLM. I’ve used local LLMs a lot and I spend a lot of time with frontier models and the difference is still huge. As far as I can tell, the social media posts about local LLMs replacing frontier models are either wishful thinking, engagement bait, or people who must be working on much simpler projects with a much higher tolerance for slop than I have.

weitendorfabout 5 hours ago
I have exactly the same opinion

Over the last couple years I’ve had to learn sales and understand the thought process behind this better, and I think I’m beginning to understand it

The psychology is that most people aren’t really trying to optimize for productivity (even most people who think they are) on an ROI basis, because their compensation is too decoupled from their actual raw output, and more closely coupled to how differentiated their marginal contribution is to peers. They’re much more incentivized to spend their personal/work time optimizing for being more skilled or acquiring some kind of competitive advantage relative to baseline.

Most people don’t consciously run the numbers of “I get paid $X/hr to add $Y of value” or model pay at work as something with variable inputs (eg something that can be increased with high performance), so it makes sense to them to spend 20 hours of time to save $100 or to make themselves 5% less efficient to take home 0.5% more or avoid doing something they don’t want to start doing.

NOT saying this always happens or that they’re stupid for doing so. I didn’t even realize how much I had been doing it myself until I started recognizing it, and shifted to having my own comp/performance fully aligned with the company’s P/L.

It actually makes a lot of sense IF you can accurately estimate incremental upside (which is much harder and more diffuse than modeling downside if you’re salaried a employee) or if the upfront skill/knowledge investment that looks like bikeshedding pays off in the long run.

chasd00about 4 hours ago
These are great points. It's a little off topic but what you bring up is why i advise new grads to spend the first couple years of their career in small eat-what-you-kill companies. I think software devs who start out in large companies get this distorted view that their twice a month direct deposit is just magic and comes from the ether no matter what they do. The whole industry would be better off if everyone started out in a "you don't deliver, you don't eat" company and grew from there.
disiplusabout 5 hours ago
To be fair, there is no 3 turns that I don't have to jump in into what Opus 5 is doing. There is either some regression or my prompting skills are so much worse now. Flash is not perfect and honestly some things depend on how big context do you keep. So I'm keeping like a really short context with my flash, but it works okay, even though it has a tendency to overthink, and yeah, I run it always in max effort mode.
Implicatedabout 3 hours ago
Use Opus 4.8. 5 is absolute garbage.

Don't use DS4 Flash in max effort mode. It's just spinning its wheels, in my experience (I have a harness for testing models with 25 real bugs/features/etc from my real projects that I measure outcomes against) DS4 flash does _worse_ with max effort. It will literally have the right approach and reason itself away from it.

wolttamabout 4 hours ago
Hopefully you also bought a switch
whalesaladabout 3 hours ago
they have 2 interfaces each so you typically daisy chain them
wolttamabout 2 hours ago
That will hurt latency and latency is very important for good tensor-parallelism performance
0xbadcafebeeabout 5 hours ago
If you used the bare API pricing, 1M tokens @ 30% input/70% output/50% cached, you'd pay $0.05805. Even with four discounted sparks, how much are you paying for the same tokens/distribution?
swatcoderabout 5 hours ago
There's soooo much by way of experiments, explorations, tinkering, and even projects that you can't possibly pursue through a some SaaS API.

The more reasonable comparison is against rented GPU's, while looking at tradeoffs in latency and upload/download/storage/instance management overhead.

Buying hardware for local models is meeting a wholly different need than buying tokens through OpenRouter or whatever.

vehemenzabout 4 hours ago
It cuts both ways. A GPU in your basement is a depreciating asset with fixed computing power and consumes electricity. Switching model providers is trivial.
mmastracabout 5 hours ago
For me it's entirely because I have a bunch of projects with my own personal data that would be tough to do with openrouter/claude or any other cloud.

For example, I have a small posix-shell-based LLM harness that can SSH into my NAS and run organization tasks using the local DS4Flash that I have right now. It's already been a massive help for me to keep me organized, and that's just 2x DGX Spark's worth of compute.

0xbadcafebee25 minutes ago
I'm not trying to say there is no use case. I just want to know the cost. Is it less than the API cost? Is it the same? Is it more? I'm looking for hard numbers. If the cost is the same or more, then the decision for local isn't to save money
Implicatedabout 3 hours ago
If your usage wouldn't change with local inference and you don't have security/privacy concerns then at the currently heavily subsidized pricing, sure.. not economical.

But things change real fast when you're no longer bound by costs/apis/rate limits. All of a sudden it's not about "how can I do this right and efficiently" and more about "I can poke at and test _all the things_ that might make this better".

I think most people who can't see this value in the local inference approach are likely still copy/pasting from their web LLM ui's or don't even come close to subscription quotas. Meanwhile, 1b tokens a day is a light day for me with 3 $200/m subscriptions + some level of sub at basically every frontier level provider. Had I been less frugal and ponied up for the hardware before things got crazy I wouldn't need 80% of that - just the frontier models for the most complex tasks, the open weight models would handle the rest easily _and_ I'd get to do a lot more exploratory work without concern about quotas.

hypferabout 3 hours ago
What do you do with all those tokens?
pohl5 minutes ago
Does the word "flash" mean a specific thing when it comes to LLM models? I noticed that this word is used by gemini, qwen, and z.ai and I'm curious does it mean the same thing for each one, or did they all just accidentally brand similarly?
Doohickey-d4 minutes ago
It seems like it has come to mean "fast, small, cheap" models these days, and seems well enough understood as such that different AI labs are adopting it.
mrngldabout 5 hours ago
Chinese labs are so used to manipulating benchmarks to try to flatter inferior models that when they finally have one that's really pretty good I think the official announcement here undersells it.

https://deepswe.datacurve.ai/

That's pretty solid. Smarter and cheaper than Luna xhigh, not as smart but less expensive than Luna max. Smashes deepseek v4 flash, and even worse it matches v4 pro at a tiny fraction the cost. Roughly equivalent to sol medium, at a fraction the cost.

They should've just lead with real, up to date data, because it's good, not the silly old tactics like comparing to Opus 4.8 when 5.0 is out in many of their charts.

Congrats to them!

cameronh90about 5 hours ago
Maybe others have found otherwise, but I find the benchmarks drastically different to real world "feel" of a model, even within the same harness. I'm not sure if this just reflects personal interaction styles, or if it is indicative of benchmaxxing or unrealistic automated benchmarking methodology.

Opus 5 consistently comes at or near the top, but outputs constant unreadable jibberish. Meanwhile GPT 5.6 Luna medium tends to be rated pretty poor on agentic tasks compared to the Chinese lab open models, but I find the latter much more likely to lose track of their own behaviour during a long-horizon task or get stuck in a doom loop.

(This isn't a comment on GLM-5.3 Flash as I've not used it!)

trey-jonesabout 4 hours ago
I've been using 5.3 since they initially announced it and my gut feel is that it's not as good as 5.2 for agentic tasks. I'm still using it - I don't think it's bad. I'm just not convinced it's better.
gunalx19 minutes ago
I have had the opposite where I felt 5.3 as a stronger model than 5.2. Its feels way more in tune with my code, and does more nuanced edits. Though I do handhold my models a lot, so might fall outside the agentic term.
disiplusabout 3 hours ago
idk i think that i spend significant tokens with both to be able to tell 5.3 is way better overall.

https://kommodo.ai/i/IFSUUQYT522uZXWvePZ1

it still fells stupid sometimes and it is benchmaxxed for sure. but its good enough that im building all the hobby projects with it.

glubabout 3 hours ago
I don't know how anyone can actually use Luna max on ANY real workload. I've had Sol orchestrate a bunch of Luna agents, these agents were explicitly given small chunks of larger objectives and they still filled their entire context windows with just reasoning tokens, until compaction hit, and then reasoning again.

I've probably wasted a good 40% of my weekly usage on Luna Max agents just thinking and not writing a single line of code.

amlutoabout 2 hours ago
The one time I tried asking Sol to use subagents for a small project, it took a surprisingly long time, used up the entire usage limit in one go, and basically failed the project.

I’m pretty sure that plain Sol, serially, could have finished the task faster, cheaper, and far more accurately. I’m also pretty sure that any competent subagent orchestration could have gotten it done with even very simple subagents quickly and cheaply.

(Is it really that hard to set up a handful of subagents that all use the same initial context and to load that context with what actually matters? The APIs certainly support it.)

kilroy123about 2 hours ago
I feel the same. I just use it for planning and chatting. Not real coding work.
John7878781about 2 hours ago
Luna max is all I use. In my experience, it works really well for overnight tasks.
redox99about 5 hours ago
It's also better than Sol (at whatever effort) at designing pretty UIs. I have a Codex sub and I've been using this model for UI stuff.
mkageniusabout 3 hours ago
> I've been using this model for UI stuff.

The flash one?

glubabout 3 hours ago
Yes. I have no UI experience, and wanted a model that could produce something good without me telling it how anything should look like.

My prompt was something like: "here's data I have, here's what matters to me, create HTML mockup".

All GPT 5.6 models were laughably bad. And I don't want to downplay it - they were just absolutely, objectively horrible. Every single attempt was what I could probably call "if json was ui".

Claude models produced... "claude look".

GLM 5.3 - somewhere between GPT and Claude.

Kimi k3 - each attempt produced beautiful UIs. It used components that I didn't even know existed and wouldn't even know to ask for. But expensive, very expensive.

ox-alpha (GLM 5.3 flash) was very close to K3. And at this price point, it's already configured as "designer" model in my oh-my-pi.

redox99about 3 hours ago
Yeah, when it was secretly called Ox Alpha.
seaalabout 5 hours ago
Only 73K output tokens too. Anthropic should really be embarrassed with their Sonnet 5 price/performance.
stavrosabout 5 hours ago
Opus 5 is better than Fable in this benchmark?
zarzavatabout 5 hours ago
Even Artificial Analysis has Opus 5 better than Fable in their aggregated "Intelligence Index" which combines 9 benchmarks. Opus 5 is heavily benchmaxxed.
re-thcabout 5 hours ago
> They should've just lead with real, up to date data, because it's good, not the silly old tactics like comparing to Opus 4.8 when 5.0 is out in many of their charts

It's what people know. Opus is just the common target.

> Smarter and cheaper than Luna xhigh, not as smart but less expensive than Luna max. Smashes deepseek v4 flash

The problem with this and DeepSWE is it goes for a very specific profile. I'm not convinced DeepSWE is any accurate in actual work. It's surely a different signal (compared to some that allow cheating) but it has its own issues, e.g. weak harness.

Luna is great at following instructions but bad instructions or anything not covered = death.

Deepseek is more analytical. Good for bug tracking.

GLM is a better all rounder in some ways. Better at creativity.

bertiliabout 4 hours ago
This is going so fast! What a time to be on hackernews:

July 16th: The "Kimi K3 moment" - China has caught up to Opus!

4 weeks later: GLM 5.3 - Same performance, but cut the amount of parameters and cost to a third!

12 days later: GLM 5.3 Flash - Almost GLM5.3 performance but cut the parameters in half, cut prices to a fifth and serving on Chinese chips!

Alifatiskabout 3 hours ago
And don't forget the coolest part, DeepSeek, Qwen, Z.ai and Moonshot have almost caught up while being open about their research and their model weights. We can mostly speculate about OAI and Anthropic models, nothing else, how fun huh?
nylonstrung3 minutes ago
The next 12 months will see OAI and Anthropic spiral into into increasingly hyperbolic PR stunts, manufactured benchmarks and underhanded attempts at regulatory captures

I'm sure they have nothing to rival this on a price/performance basis and have already given up on that

kzrdudeabout 3 hours ago
Exactly, DeepSeek, Qwen etc are catching the attention because they put out their tech docs and papers, so we can read about how the models work and what they think their innovation was this time.
jatinsabout 3 hours ago
except besides benchmarks, most of these models don't meet reliability of Sol/Opus in coding work. Opus unfortunately talks very weirdly so not a great out of the box experience
computerex14 minutes ago
You'll find that hard to prove objectively and conclusively.
matheusmoreiraabout 5 hours ago
You guys read Z.ai's terms of service, right?

Broad and perpetual license over inputs and outputs, and even your name and profile picture.

Vague prohibitions on whatever may harm Z.ai’s "interests" or even the "national interests" of any country.

Vague prohibitions on "disturbing" or "inappropriate" content, whatever that is.

Vague prohibitions on discussing Z.ai, even my posting this comment violates it.

Can ban you if you, in the "sole and absolute opinion" of Z.ai, have violated these broad terms, and if you paid for the discounted yearly plan kiss your money goodbye.

g3f32rabout 5 hours ago
Isn't this practically every TOS though?

Nearly every TOS I've ever read has a "We can ban you for any reason, or no reason, are under no obligation to disclose any reason." line somewhere in it.

HN's for example

> We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change or modify portions of these Terms of Use at any time.

> You acknowledge that Y Combinator may establish general practices and limits concerning use of the Site,

> You further acknowledge that Y Combinator reserves the right to change these general practices and limits at any time, in its sole discretion, with or without notice.

> Y Combinator reserves the right to investigate and take appropriate legal action against anyone who, in Y Combinator’s sole discretion, violates this provision, including without limitation, removing the offending content from the Site, suspending or terminating the account of such violators and reporting you to the law enforcement authorities.

matheusmoreiraabout 2 hours ago
> Isn't this practically every TOS though?

Not even close. Even OpenAI and Anthropic aren't bad enough that they claim literal ownership of your inputs and outputs.

> HN's for example

You're not paying to use HN. Getting banned here has essentially zero consequences.

If Z.ai uses its absolute powers to ban you because you wrote a review about them or something, then you lose actual money. This is especially relevant if you're looking to take advantage of their discounted yearly payment option.

KronisLVabout 2 hours ago
Consider the reputation implications of them banning someone who can get their complaint about it to the front page of HN and into the YouTube drama loop. They’d get swarmed with activist cancellations.

At most I suspect the A.I. providers will just come up with yellow banners like Anthropic did where naughty smut writers get put in the time out corner.

joelthelion2 minutes ago
As long as the weights are open, who cares? You can rely on someone else for inference.
glubabout 3 hours ago
> Can ban you if you, in the "sole and absolute opinion" of Z.ai, have violated these broad terms.

OpenAI revoked my Cyber verification, along with many others, asked to reverify (i.e. give my biometric information to Persona), had me do it 8 times, just to find out several days later that they silently implemented a nationality whitelist, and my nationality didn't make it (and no, it's not a sanctioned country).

Their support says they can't look into anything or do anything, and their public spokespersons on X deny everything.

I get tons of cyber refusals now (lots of reverse engineering), so it's only matter of time when my account is going to get banned.

At least Z.AI is being honest here. And no provider other than OAI/ANT had me submit my biometric information just to use Ghidra.

matheusmoreiraabout 2 hours ago
> just to find out several days later that they silently implemented a nationality whitelist, and my nationality didn't make it (and no, it's not a sanctioned country)

How did you discover this?

I opened the Persona tab once, closed it and the tab never opened ever again. "Precheck failed".

What countries are banned? I'm from Brazil.

I went as far as initiating an LGPD (brazilian GDPR) process against them due to this. At some point I got it in writing that I'm allowed to make a new account and try again. Until now I was assuming it was just some weird account state. If I'm banned from TAC due to my nationality that's seriously disgusting...

glubabout 2 hours ago
When they initially revoked TAC for a bunch of users due to a "technical error", the TAC verification flow opened a Persona iframe where you select the document country first. I was able to select it there (Georgia, in my case), went through the entire flow, and then got locked out after 8 attempts. Persona itself was successful end to end, so it failed somewhere on the OAI side. Other users then started reporting the exact same issue on the OpenAI forum.

A week later, I tried testing the TAC flow on my SO's account, which had never had a TAC attempt before. Selecting Georgia in the Persona iframe now says, "We are unable to verify identities in this country."

But I know this isn't a Persona limitation, as I verified with Anthropic using Persona the same day.

So what I think happened was this: OpenAI silently implemented a country whitelist on their end and revoked TAC for affected individuals who already had it, calling it a "technical issue". They forgot to disable those countries in Persona, so everyone just got a cryptic error. Then they disabled them in Persona too.

Interaction with support was AI with human names, which essentially just repeats what you said. And it ended with:

> I’m unable to provide additional details about verification outcomes, and Support cannot manually override the result. At this time, Trusted Access for Cyber verification does not support retries or appeals.

I even provided them my credentials, and support AI was basically: lol wat we're here to check technical errors, your credentials are of no relevance.

computerex5 minutes ago
How is that vastly different from any other non-enterprise facing provider? I do believe Anthropic bans accounts without even a human in the loop with no recourse left to those banned.
zaj00labout 5 hours ago
I get all that.

Then alternatives are:

- Grok - where I absolutely have 0 trust in X.ai's interst in "pushing humanity forward".

- OpenAI and Anthropic - which seem to try to be building the biggest moat they can by pushing to ban open models. And at the same time want to be an Arbiter of what level of intelligence I can use.

- Google and Meta - I don't need to talk about the practices of these companies.

Yes, the terms of service aren't great. But the alternatives aren't great either. I don't believe that a future which OpenAI and Anthropic are pushing for has my best interest in mind.

matheusmoreiraabout 2 hours ago
> I don't believe that a future which OpenAI and Anthropic are pushing for has my best interest in mind.

I don't believe in that either, but these totalitarian terms are absolutely unacceptable.

well_ackshually40 minutes ago
If only you could grab those models and host them literally anywhere else where you wouldn't be subject to those terms. Damn. Maybe we'll have to wait for someone to invent something like open download of model weights.
bestouffabout 4 hours ago
Or Deepseek, Qwen, any other open model hosted by whoever you trust most.
zuzululuabout 4 hours ago
All the American companies you mentioned still follow American law and regulation. Skirting that blatantly has big consequences.

Chinese companies do not follow American laws and there are absolutely no consequences for violating it.

Moreover, the average American is not even aware of exactly what the legal/judicial environment is like in China. If your code and data is stolen, you can't fly to China and demand justice in the courts.

twobitshifterabout 2 hours ago
Is copyright infringement an American Law?
Implicatedabout 3 hours ago
> All the American companies you mentioned still follow American law and regulation. Skirting that blatantly has big consequences. > Chinese companies do not follow American laws and there are absolutely no consequences for violating it.

... lmk when anthropic/openai/spacex/xai are held accountable for anything. Anything at all. Hard to be when you're _writing_ the rules.

jst1fthsdysabout 2 hours ago
> All the American companies you mentioned still follow American law and regulation. Skirting that blatantly has big consequences.

No, they don’t. This is an absurd statement to make in 2026.

croesabout 3 hours ago
Aren’t those American companies sued because they didn’t follow American law?
microtonalabout 5 hours ago
The model is MIT-licensed, so run it on any of the non-Chinese inference providers that will host it in a few days.
PhilippGilleabout 2 hours ago
gunalx15 minutes ago
Yes, the terms are dubious. But they are also reasonably lenient with enforcement. They also don't require persona id verification, witch is wat turned me away from openai.
zarzavatabout 5 hours ago
It's China. It's a given that they use your data for training. At least they're nice enough to be honest about it.
yogthosabout 4 hours ago
It's not like US companies don't do the same either.
trvzabout 3 hours ago
It’s implied that they do, but don’t have the balls to tell you they do.
Lwerewolfabout 5 hours ago
The model weights are MIT licensed.
matheusmoreiraabout 2 hours ago
I'm talking about the Z.ai service specifically.
Lwerewolfabout 1 hour ago
As others have mentioned, nothing's stopping any other major provider from offering it. Given its popularity, you can guess how that'll develop. So, overall, irrelevant.
singularity2001about 4 hours ago
I blocked Z.ai as soon as they were loading 10 different external providers including Alibaba who was just proven to execute silent sound fingerprinting mechanisms.
mromanuk29 minutes ago
You can download the weights, and run in your own hardware and avoid all that.
mrinterwebabout 4 hours ago
Give it a couple days, and there will be plenty of other inference companies hosting it. Don't like z.ai's TOS? Use the model on a provider with TOS that you agree with.
throwawayffffasabout 4 hours ago
None of that applies if you run it at home. Also 3rd party providers will start serving this pretty soon under different terms.
matheusmoreiraabout 2 hours ago
> None of that applies if you run it at home.

Yeah, running frontier open weight models on my own hardware has essentially become my dream at this point. I hope the hardware manufacturers step up production to meet consumer demand.

well_ackshually41 minutes ago
>Broad and perpetual license over inputs and outputs, and even your name and profile picture.

>Vague prohibitions on whatever may harm Z.ai’s "interests" or even the "national interests" of any country.

[...] may cause harm to Anthropic, our users, or third parties, we reserve the right to remove or take down some or all of such Third-Party Content using, where appropriate, algorithmic and human review.

You may not export or provide access to the Services into any U.S. embargoed countries or to anyone on (i) the U.S. Treasury Department’s list of Specially Designated Nationals, (ii) any other restricted party lists identified by the Office of Foreign Asset Control, (iii) the U.S. Department of Commerce Denied Persons List or Entity List, or (iv) any other restricted party lists

>Vague prohibitions on "disturbing" or "inappropriate" content, whatever that is.

we will use Materials for model training when [...] your Materials are flagged for safety review to improve our ability to detect harmful content, enforce our policies, or advance our safety research.

>Vague prohibitions on discussing Z.ai, even my posting this comment violates it.

>Can ban you if you, in the "sole and absolute opinion" of Z.ai, have violated these broad terms, and if you paid for the discounted yearly plan kiss your money goodbye.

To engage in any other conduct that restricts or inhibits any person from using or enjoying our Services, or that we reasonably consider exposes us—or any of our users, affiliates, or any other third party—to any liability, damages, or detriment of any type, including reputational harms.

Mind you, that's Anthropic's Terms of Use in Europe. I have zero doubts the TOS applied to the US is even worse and that merely mentioning your first born in a chat entitles them to a part of its soul.

scotty79about 5 hours ago
TOS is and will ever be just a "pretty please".
NicoJuicyabout 4 hours ago
Chinese laws are not valid in the EU
jtbaylyabout 4 hours ago
That’s pretty funny to say when the EU claims GDPR applies worldwide.
croesabout 3 hours ago
What they don’t do. They claim that the GDPR applies if you provide your service in the EU, and that’s a valid claim.
deadbabeabout 3 hours ago
> Vague prohibitions on "disturbing" or "inappropriate" content, whatever that is.

I have prompted out a lot of disturbing and inappropriate content with GLM-5.2, that would have left other American models blanched in the face or clutch their pearls. I think this is mostly a reference to Anti-CCP stuff.

In fact, I don't think I've ever even had a prompt refused.

wewtyflakesabout 2 hours ago
It is cliche, but I haven't had good luck with having Chinese models openly discuss historical topics like Tienanmen Square. The US models don't seem to have a problem discussing history, even if it points an unglamorous light on the US government.
colingauvinabout 4 hours ago
Who the hell cares when I can run it myself?
realusernameabout 5 hours ago
They all do that, some are just more honest to tell you upfront than others.
culiabout 3 hours ago
you can abliterate any open model like this. This is pretty standard stuff in a TOS. I'd be surprised if you couldn't find the same in OAI or Anthropic's
dzongaabout 3 hours ago
> Before release, we tested GLM-5.3-Flash anonymously as ox-alpha on OpenCode and OpenRouter to gather user feedback. It quickly became the most popular model of the week — with all of this traffic served on Chinese AI chips.

Just like that we are witnessing an open burial. It's now in everyone's interest to keep the valuations in the 'A.I' economy as they're though it's apparent they're not justified.

whether it's the cost to develop models, cost of hardware, cost of serving ie inference.

preommrabout 2 hours ago
So the vagueposting by googlers about Ox Alpha was just... what exactly?

Like I get that they have to be careful about comms, but surely senior members of the team can clarify when something is NOT them, when everyone is gosspiing it is them.

asar12 minutes ago
On Twitter they mentioned that it was unfortunate timing as the 3.7 flash release collided with ox alpha.
qeternityabout 2 hours ago
Trolling. GLM is heavily distilled from Gemini.
gunalx7 minutes ago
Early glm models gave off that wibe. But now its more inspired by. With a bit of Claude in there. But I do think they actually do RL otherwise glm5.3 shouldn't have been able to beat fable on the few tests it did.
bel8about 1 hour ago
Source? GLM is great for coding and Gemini is barely useful in coding, to be generous.

I highly suspect that the Gemini Google uses internally is very different from what they offer in Antigravity.

sunbumabout 6 hours ago
> with all of this traffic served on Chinese AI chips

RIP Nivida shareholders

Bluesteinabout 6 hours ago
This is the takeaway here: That's how they have been serving it at scale as Ox-Alpha. This is a definitional moment.-

Further quote:

"Compared with our initial baseline on the same hardware, we achieved a 3× improvement in end-to-end serving performance, reaching hardware efficiency and per-token cost comparable to mainstream NVIDIA GPUs. This demonstrates that Chinese chips can support frontier-model inference efficiently and economically at scale."

https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.3-flash

xtractoabout 2 hours ago
Anyone knows what are those Chinese chips? Can they be bought? (Assuming im not i the US, And actually im in a 3rd world country).
gunalx4 minutes ago
They are high end really expensive Huawei ascend GPUs. It is kinda bruteforcing the performance on a older semiconductor processing tech, so total production is pretty low.
WarmWashabout 5 hours ago
I don't see a situation where subscription payers move outside American LLMs (chatgpt, claude, gemini)

And I don't see a situation where serious API payers are OK with handing the Chinese state all their data. Like manufactures of decades past did and learned a hard, even existential, lesson for it. The state mantra has been "Collect and Copy" for a long time now, tech just hasn't had that moment to experience it yet.

So that leaves local hosting/leasing, but one of those has totally non-practical economics and the other doesn't have enough compute to meet any kind of real demand.

I also have yet to meet a single person who isn't neck-deep in the tech space mention a Chinese LLM. It's 100% the big American three.

If anything it's custom chips from the labs that threatens Nvidia.

rapindabout 3 hours ago
These open models serve as price / performance pressure. Not all tasks require frontier models and cheap open models can be quite good for in-app assistants, if you're building that sort of thing. We also aren't sure the subscriptions will continue to be sustainable. They're currently subsidized to the tune of 50-70x. As someone who is hitting limits weekly that would easily cost me over $10k month per sub.
uhfraidabout 4 hours ago
What about the current situation, where serious API payers are increasingly OK with using open-weight models running on US providers?

https://www.ft.com/content/32a70a3c-7d28-40b4-808e-36edb58c7...

pianopatrickabout 4 hours ago
I can easily see a situation where most non American AI usage is on Chinese models on Chinese chips though.
Jcampuzano2about 5 hours ago
Genuine question but who do you put as the "three" in big three.

Because I genuinely can't tell if you mean Google or SpaceX/X.ai lol.

WarmWashabout 5 hours ago
Google probably serves more tokens then OAI and Anthropic combined, even if many of those tokens aren't from explicit gemini requests, but from AI overviews and other service integrations.

xAI is already selling spare compute, and basically exists just to gas spacex's perceived valuation.

dannywabout 6 hours ago
Another self-inflicted own courtesy of US government policy.

While I think China would always get to hardware self-sufficiency eventually, all export controls have done is (1) accelerate China's development, and (2) divert revenue that would've otherwise gone to NVIDIA/AMD/etc instead.

mrngldabout 5 hours ago
Long term it's irrelevant. The only relevant thing is that there's lots of money in chips that can do high performance inference. You see all kinds of competitor products in development or already on the market even here in the US where there are no such restrictions. Cerebras comes to mind. It's natural and expected that eventually Nvidia will either have to keep way ahead or competition will catch up with specialized products.

That doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination Nvidia will disappear. But the entire stock market valuation, not just tech, has had me scratching my head for a while.

bigyabaiabout 1 hour ago
Cerebras "competes" with Nvidia in the same way a Vespa scooter competes with a Ford F-150. Groq and Tenstorrent are in a similar boat, ASICs don't really threaten CUDA.

Curiously, there is not a single real CUDA competitor anywhere in the world. We almost had one with OpenCL, but all of the American stakeholders abandoned it right before the crypto/AI takeoff. All of which means that Nvidia sets their own margins, exploiting American investors and taxpayers while letting China avoid their dominance. So the American economy subsumes the bulk of Nvidia's arbitrarily-priced debt, and the Chinese economy can direct SOEs to pour billions in liquid cash into real GPGPU research.

I'm an American and I'm pretty fond of Nvidia, but Jensen was right about this policy; it gives China everything they need to actually replace CUDA. It's reminiscent of America's attempts to deprive China of ARM and Texas Instruments IP, only to end up swimming in unlicensed clones after refusing to sign an IP deal.

ignoramousabout 5 hours ago
The export controls were revoked before it triggered Chinese protectionism: https://www.silicon.co.uk/e-innovation/artificial-intelligen... / https://archive.vn/B2pah
mlinseyabout 5 hours ago
Revoked or not, just ever having those controls signals to the Chinese ecosystem that you're not necessarily a reliable supplier (Would you trust US export policy to remain stable for the next ~decade given the state of US politic?) and to the Chinese government just how strategically important you see these components.

This isn't the kind of thing you can hash out in public and go back and forth on. Once you put it out there, the other party will take steps to make sure they don't have to rely on us in the long run.

anramonabout 3 hours ago
And it doesn't matter, it still pushed China to speed-up their AI related hardware development.
bigbadfelineabout 5 hours ago
The export controls were not revoked, only reduced, and not before, but after China refused to buy low performing chips. Top gear was and is still sanctioned, as is any EUVL equipment.
re-thcabout 5 hours ago
> The export controls were revoked before

Zai is on another "export control" list outside the broader 1. Doesn't help.

Aurornisabout 5 hours ago
Ox Alpha is a smaller model and it was running very slowly. Chinese AI accelerators are coming along, but nVidia’s lead is huge.
VulgarExigencyabout 4 hours ago
It was being served for free. They were almost certainly being overloaded.
Aurornisabout 2 hours ago
Presumably the efficiency numbers they're quoting are for the high concurrency state they were serving.

RAM was probably the bottleneck for the amount of context they were offering.

I assume it would run a little faster with lower concurrency but "RIP nVidia" is a little premature. The cutting edge inference hardware is amazingly powerful

Implicatedabout 3 hours ago
> and it was running very slowly

... I'm at a loss for words here. It was being served for free. To the entire world.

Aurornisabout 2 hours ago
GPT-5.6 Luna is also served for free to the entire world with a tokens per second rate nearly 10X higher.

> ... I'm at a loss for words here

No need to be so dramatic. I think it's great that they're developing chips, but the whole "RIP nVidia" claim was overly dramatic.

knowaveragejoeabout 5 hours ago
Has there been any confirmation about what that model even is?

Edit: Ah:

> This stealth model was developed and operated by ZAI, revealed to be ZAI GLM-5.3-Flash.

cortesoftabout 4 hours ago
It's also in this very announcement, in the first paragraph:

> Before release, we tested GLM-5.3-Flash anonymously as ox-alpha on OpenCode and OpenRouter to gather user feedback. It quickly became the most popular model of the week — with all of this traffic served on Chinese AI chips.

bityardabout 3 hours ago
Most US companies that have anything to do with government, finance, medical, etc. already have contractual or regulatory obligations which prevent them from using Chinese hardware or services, even before the AI boom. That's a huge market.

Nvidia will do just fine. (Disclaimer: not a shareholder. At least, not directly.)

cheema33about 2 hours ago
> Most US companies that have anything to do with government, finance, medical, etc... That's a huge market.

Compared to the rest of the world?

bityard30 minutes ago
I don't have any pie charts in front of me, but yes, I would estimate it's a decently big slice of the world market.
ChoosesBarbecueabout 6 hours ago
God I wish I could’ve shorted NVIDIA right now
browningstreetabout 6 hours ago
It's earnings day for them...
re-thcabout 6 hours ago
Which 9/10 times hasn't been great anyway (stock reaction).
kingstnapabout 5 hours ago
Whats stopping you? You could buy puts right now.

Get a 210 strike put contract and if your thesis is that nvidias current 10 day slide continues you could make some money.

outworlderabout 4 hours ago
Unless NVidia craters you are likely to lose money given the IV crush that will happen today.
redox99about 5 hours ago
Not really a brag: it ran like shit. Very slow (~20tps, VERY high latency) and it would timeout all the time.

I'm sure the chips are fine, but they clearly didn't have enough capacity for the demand they had (that 100T/day claim was asbolute bs)

nchmyabout 5 hours ago
seems unlikely that they'll get nearly as much demand now that it isnt free
redox99about 5 hours ago
Sure, although I still expect it to become the most used model on openrouter.
Implicatedabout 3 hours ago
> it ran like shit. Very slow (~20tps, VERY high latency) and it would timeout all the time.

Boy, do you have a rude awakening in store.

ThouYSabout 6 hours ago
yay, I called it! :) (in the other thread)
rvzabout 6 hours ago
This is no surprise [0] [1].

>> "They are already there on open weight models and Jensen knows that it is only a matter of time until China catches up with GPUs or other AI accelerators."

It is also why Nvidia becoming a bank for other AI companies who are unable to find VCs to fund them isn't really a good thing and that is bearish.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49397204

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49431231

saberienceabout 3 hours ago
Not really. Chinese AI companies were never using NVidia AI chips.

This announcement doesn't really mean anything at all. It means the very few people who are already using Z.ai's API will continue to do so, but the vast majority of money going to Nvidia is through the massive amount of business going to Anthropic, OpenAI, and other western cloud providers and inference providers, who are mostly using NVidia chips for inference.

Also, NVidia chips are still sold out and supply constrained.

XCSmeabout 3 hours ago
Nice, finally they fixed the huge reasoning tokens count.

Now it's similar cost to DeepSeek v4 flash, but smarter.

My tests: https://aibenchy.com/compare/z-ai-glm-5-3-flash-max/deepseek...

pietzabout 4 hours ago
With tiny models surpassing huge, 6 months old models on benchmarks, does anybody have some smart words to share on how these still "feel" different?

Artificial Analysis ranks GPT 5.6 Luna similar to GPT 5.4, but that never matches my real world experience. AA seems to do a good job making a single number as representative as possible but there is still so much benchmarks don't communicate.

KptMarchewaabout 4 hours ago
I agree. They are definitely good - no issues with instruction following for example - but they miss the "intelligence" larger models have.

For implementation tasks, where I have the problem already defined and researched, or just simple task, I'd definitely use something like Luna xhigh or max. If the task is vague, or involves planning, I'd rather use Sol medium, even though it's theoretically worse on benchmarks.

fridder16 minutes ago
Could do a "Big model for architecture and planning and smaller model (or local model) for implementation" sort of thing
revolvingthrowabout 6 hours ago
> 320B total parameters and just 18B active parameters

This is pretty hefty for a "flash" model, even a 256 GB setup is insufficient at q4 - and q4 is already the worst-but-still-acceptable quant in my experience. The benchmarks look great, especially since GLM tends to be more honest than the average Chinese lab, but you’ll need to splurge to run it at home.

@edit: so many releases that I forgot to math. This fits just fine in q4, realistically the minimal hardware would be 192gb - so blazing fast on double rtx 6000 pro and usable on 256gb unified memory. You could even go with 5bit quant on 256gb.

… you’ll still need to splurge, though.

yonatan8070about 1 hour ago
Speaking as someone who isn't really well versed in this, does 18B active parameters mean that you could potentially hold only the 18B parameters in RAM and stream the rest from a fast NVMe SSD for acceptable performance similar to how Colibri works?

https://github.com/JustVugg/colibri

Wheenabout 1 hour ago
Sorta, but you're off by one layer. You can store the 18B in VRAM and stream the rest from RAM. There's still a performance hit relative to storing it all in VRAM, but it's tolerable.

Generally, for local consumer use, these large MOE models are best for unified RAM systems like DGX Spark or Mac Studio.

colingauvinabout 6 hours ago
That's 160GB-ish for Q4...how is 256 insufficient?
dannywabout 6 hours ago
Looks like the M5 Ultra Studio wait times are going to increase again. Already at 10-12 weeks, I wonder how long it'll go?
speedgooseabout 6 hours ago
I guess like the M3 Ultra, at some point normal customers won’t be able to buy it.
trvzabout 1 hour ago
That M3 had an older type of RAM. Apple hopefully secured sufficient supply of the newer variant for the M5 Ultra.
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mowmiatlas11 minutes ago
i wonder if more companies will now stealth launch their models. imagine they just released this on openrouter for free but under their normal name - would they get the records in token usage then?
simonwabout 1 hour ago
joquarkyabout 1 hour ago
I only see a mostly blank page with a "Paste" button, a "URL" button, and and a "Preview" label.
simonw39 minutes ago
By chance you have a browser extension that might block fetching data from raw.githubusercontent.com ?
TaLiTrabout 6 hours ago
> it outperforms GLM-5.2 across benchmarks and real-world workloads at one-tenth the price, while approaching Claude Opus 4.8 on coding and agentic benchmarks.

From a biased source, but would be big if true. I've had great results with GLM 5.2.

From their subscription page, the smallest plan gives you about 97M tokens weekly for 5.3 but 292M for 5.3 Flash. Not exactly 10x the limit.

wolttamabout 6 hours ago
The recent and slightly smaller DSv4 Flash is also GLM 5.2 equivalent (or close enough)
tokaiabout 5 hours ago
DSv4 hallucinates much more than GLM-5.2 though.
re-thcabout 6 hours ago
> From a biased source, but would be big if true. I've had great results with GLM 5.2.

It's at least close (even if not better) from the Ox Alpha runs. For the price it's definitely great.

Aboutplants44 minutes ago
When do Chinese models surpass US models? I thought there was at least be a 2 year runway but now I think they surpass it within 12 months, if not sooner.
lxeabout 5 hours ago
Is the actual Z.AI ecosystem good enough to replace the main drivers like Codex and Claude? Because it looks like Z Code is just a Codex fork. Just like the Kimi Code one is.

What irks me about this is that the harnesses seem to be just an afterthought here.

Don't get me wrong, I love messing around with installing Pi, getting it hooked up with OpenRouter, and just trying all kinds of different stuff, local models, etc... but when it comes to literally just setting up a productivity environment and trusting my entire machine with it, I just run Codex.

I have heard from anecdotes where people have indeed replaced their main drivers with DeepSek V4 Flash or GLM and state that "it's almost as good as... [claude/gpt]" but I never hear anyone say "yeah, this is the model/harness that I now run on my machine and don't mess with it"

Bluesteinabout 5 hours ago
> "yeah, this is the model/harness that I now run on my machine and don't mess with it"

* me raises hand.-

Sphaxabout 2 hours ago
Both can be true though. I had the max coding plan since january and I kept using with Pi since then, even though it wasn’t as good as opus until glm 5.3. It definitely can be a daily driver if you don’t want to use Anthropic or OpenAI. It’s going to be even better with native vision now available. And i’m not messing with my setup either.
Havocabout 4 hours ago
Their list of allowed tools is extensive so just use whatever you want within that list

Think z code gives a token bonus though

ygouzerhabout 2 hours ago
You can use OpenRouter directly in Claude Code as well, it's quite nice!
packetlostabout 6 hours ago
For those who didn't read, this is the identity of the mysterious "Ox Alpha" model
Bluesteinabout 6 hours ago
They even give this over the API now:

https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions model: stealth/ox-alpha auth: OPENROUTER_API_KEY status: 404 Not Found response: {"error":{"message":"Thank you for participating in the Stealth Ox Alpha testing period. This model was ZAI's GLM-5.3 Flash.

│ Use it now: https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.3-flash","code":404},"user_...":"}

AbsurdCensorabout 6 hours ago
Yeah, made me suspicious of how well the Ox Alpha was performing that it wasn't some 'new group' making the model.
cootsnuckabout 5 hours ago
If we fast forward say 5 years, I don't see how we don't end up in world where people (and enterprises) are more savvy with how they use LLMs. Meaning, more models, smaller models, weirder models, more specialized models, etc. And all of it running on a variety of hardware (edge devices, personal computers, on-demand cloud compute).

I don't see how NVIDIA can keep their spot as belle of the ball. If LLMs and friends are truly to become as useful and ubiquitous as everyone thinks they will, then commoditization is the only option.

drob518about 5 hours ago
We need to figure out what the real pricing is for a going concern. Right now, everyone is subsidizing and discounting to grow (or maintain) market share. The big question is whether the steady state, market derived inference pricing is above or below what we’re seeing today. I honestly don’t know. Anthropic had said that inference is profitable, but they’re clearly not yet profitable overall with training and buildouts still happening.
apitmanabout 1 hour ago
Has nobody from any of the companies hosting open weights models released detailed information on how much it really costs?
bigyabaiabout 3 hours ago
> I don't see how NVIDIA can keep their spot as belle of the ball.

FWIW, people were saying "ASICs will kill CUDA demand!" since the crypto mining boom. Then a few months later, CUDA found another niche application in LLM applications.

With the mounting demand for robotics, surveillance and autonomous weapons, I don't see how Nvidia couldn't keep their spot. They have their pick of the litter with hundreds of market segments, and unlike the rest of FAANG they're not afraid to branch out.

Tepixabout 1 hour ago
GLM 5.3 Flash: 320B parameters with 18B activated

Qwen 3.8 Next Flash: 125B + 51B = 176B parameters with 6B activated

DeepSeek V4 Flash: 284B with 13B activated

The new Qwen model is the most promising for one or two Strix Halo 128GB with the low number of active parameters. On paper it's much stronger than Qwen 3.8 27B.

claudeIsDownabout 5 hours ago
On OpenRouter the pricing is: Input $0,075/M - Output $0,25/M - Cache Read $0,015 /M

How is the business model of Anthropic/OpenAI will sustain?

vatsachakabout 2 hours ago
I think anthropic is behind but Luna on a Jalapeno seems profitable
dakolliabout 5 hours ago
They're obviously in a pickle, nobody is going to continue to pay $15-50 a mm tokens here soon. There's a reason OpenAI stopped training large models last week, and it's not because of "saftey" or "alignment" they know these gigantic models are not worth the squeeze.
polski-gabout 2 hours ago
This is a bad model. Worse than Luna in every way; slower, dumber.
pphyschabout 2 hours ago
OAI/Anthropic shareholder? Speed and intelligence are not "every way". Cost is essential. Hence the Pareto boundary illustrated in TFA.
yipinwongabout 6 hours ago
When reading this type of announcements, always have keen eyes on graphs.

e.g. "Agent Coding Performance by Effort Level" cuts Y-axis from 0~20.

- This makes it as if GLM-5.3-Flash made a bigger jump than it claimed as the Y-axis does not increase much (stupid trick used in biz reports)

I did mention that ox was working ok for me, and having an open-weight comparable to close to SOTA makes it very compelling for me to try it out locally (well, only if I got more VRAM)

nchmyabout 5 hours ago
they also conspicuously omitted GPT 5.6 Luna from comparison. It scores lower, but is also cheaper. MiMo 2.5 is not a valid comp at this point

edit: nevermind. it is there in the artifical analysis scatter plot, but is greyed-out.

MUCH more interesting is that in that chart, their cost is WAY off. The actual chart shows GLM 5.3 Flash at $0.09, but their chart shows $0.045...

mrtesthahabout 5 hours ago
The web page says 5.3 flash is discounted right now.
drob518about 5 hours ago
Seems disingenuous to draw frontier graphs with starter pricing.
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OldGreenYodaGPTabout 1 hour ago
Tested this last week and couldn't get it to finish any task that took more then an hour with /goal keep getting errors
singularity2001about 4 hours ago
At the current 50%-off GLM-5.3-Flash price ($0.075/M input, $0.25/M output; cached input $0.015/M), surprisingly, roughly $400–900/month would buy token throughput comparable to fully exhausting Claude Max 20×
syntaxingabout 3 hours ago
Ironically, our administration pushing for ban of the AI chips to China is forcing them to make smaller and more efficient models which seems like a requirement for running on Chinese chips. I wouldn’t be surprised this model was tailored to run purely on Chinese chips. Same thing with Deepseek MLA, the drastically lower KV cache memory requirement was born out of necessity so it runs on the Huawei chips.
adroitbossabout 3 hours ago
This is exactly what Jenson said in all of his interviews. Banning it in the short term would have long term consequences.
iamsyrabout 6 hours ago
Standard API Pricing for GLM-5.3-Flash (per 1M tokens)

- Input: $0.15 - Output: $0.50 - Cached input: $0.03

Xunjinabout 6 hours ago
Is that cheaper than DS4 flash?
nateb2022about 5 hours ago
Slightly more expensive than the (post-price hike) DS4 flash pricing, but in the ballpark.

https://openrouter.ai/compare/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-073...

drob518about 5 hours ago
Hm. GLM is more expensive in all dimensions than DS but it has a lower weighted average input? How is that?? Something seems off.

EDIT: Looks like they are swizzling around the pricing dynamically on that page, on both the GLM and the DS sides, so who knows.

walrus01about 5 hours ago
Comparison should be to 0731
javier123454321about 6 hours ago
All I can say is that even if it is, I was almost glad to go back to using DS4 Flash. Because 0XAlpha was just so friggin slow to complete a task because of the level of circular reasoning that it would go over and over into, sometimes even returning no output. If I just wanted something done I would switch from a free model to a paid one which is crazy.
denysvitaliabout 6 hours ago
Tbh it was also slow because it was being hammered by everyone making use of the free tokens
swiftcoderabout 5 hours ago
It's even cheaper than DS4's off-peak pricing. Seems like DeepSeek have some stiff competition now
arizenabout 5 hours ago
Few weeks ago, I wouldn't expect this statement to be true. Accelerate!
marioptabout 6 hours ago
It's only 320B, local frontier AI is getting closer, sooner than expected.
saberienceabout 3 hours ago
It's not possible to keep shrinking down parameters and keep "frontier" performance, it's like saying it's possible to take a 3 hour movie and compress it down to 3 megabytes, there are information theoretic limits on the amount of bits of information that can be compressed.

What I'm saying is, if you're expecting a model that can be run on a 16GB or 32GB machine with the intelligence/knowledge of Mythos or Sol, it will never happen. It cannot happen, just like you cannot watch the Odyssey saved as a 16MB file.

Smaller models can get faster and smarter, but by definition they can never compress all of the knowledge of a frontier model and they will approach a limit by which they cannot get better.

hypferabout 3 hours ago
twobitshifterabout 2 hours ago
The current models are not close to approaching the limit of compression for intelligence. They aren’t even focused on it like Chinese labs are. The training of Qwen’s 27B parameter model showed that by structuring model training from fundamentals to more difficult topics they were able to drastically reduce the number of parameters needed.

The ‘frontier’ models rely on scale to achieve their results but that’s not the only approach. Eventually we will hit up against the fundamental limits but we are not close with Sol and Mythos.

oceanskyabout 6 hours ago
Can't come soon enough!
yousif_123123about 4 hours ago
Will we need all the data centers being built or will improvements in software and hardware allow the majority of AI workloads to run locally or in the cloud but way more efficiently than was projected when all the plans were laid out?

Like were executive at Google and AWS and Microsoft expecting this kind of performance from models smaller than what openai/anthropic have been doing? Are we really in a "compute desert"?

bakies30 minutes ago
If it gets more efficient it'll be more enticing to expand use case. Personally I'm hoping to do a lot at home but I'm not counting the datacenter building as a bad move at this moment. It may and up that way.
jatinsabout 3 hours ago
I was quite surprised that Zai had deep pockets to serve this free for a week. My first guess was this was an American lab like xai or google
BeetleBabout 4 hours ago
The key difference between this and all other GLM models is it's multimodal. You cannot send images to the other GLM models.
mrinterwebabout 4 hours ago
I really wish GLM models had vision capabilities. I've worked around that in the past to use a vision MCP in my harness that GLM can call. It is not the same, but it allows the model to query images.
BeetleBabout 4 hours ago
Well, now one of them does!
mrinterwebabout 1 hour ago
That's wonderful. I was going off an older version of the Artificial Analysis page for GLM-5.3-Flash https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/glm-5-3-flash. The page is updated now to show that it does support multi-modal image inputs.
garo-proabout 6 hours ago
> Combined with our latest 30T-token multimodal pre-training corpus [...]

Is the optimal formula still 20x the amount of model params in tokens for training? Could this mean we're getting a GLM with 1.5t params?

epolanskiabout 6 hours ago
I'm starting to think that this whole sanctioning China may motivate and prompt them to do more and better in every field.

It's too big, bright and resourceful of a country to choose confrontation instead of collaboration.

ricardobeatabout 6 hours ago
Starting? This was obvious way back in 2019, when the US decided to give China a little push developing their own silicon industry.
esperentabout 6 hours ago
This has been clearly stated as what would happen going back several decades at least.
pshirshovabout 4 hours ago
> I'm starting to think

That's good. Keep going.

himata4113about 6 hours ago
Well the big problem with china is that they do not respect international law when it comes to technology theft. But that argument is very weak when it appears that a lot of what they do is out in the open for anyone to replicate.
nananana9about 5 hours ago
That's how you catch up when you're behind.

Now the US is behind in EVs can you guess what they're doing? [1]

[1] https://evwire.com/p/video-ford-ceo-jim-farley-says-they-fly...

himata4113about 5 hours ago
"argument is very weak" regardless as I said.
fwipabout 5 hours ago
There isn't one global "international law" for copyright. There are treaties that countries negotiate with each other.

If the USA wanted a copyright treaty with China bad enough, we would negotiate one. China is not breaking any laws here, international or otherwise.

epolanskiabout 5 hours ago
No major power respects nor cares about international law.

Intellectual property is part of WTO agreements but enforcement is domestic.

US companies do it too, regularly, they simply hire and poach staff from competitors.

Proving it to be IP theft is difficult unless you can prove documents being passed. But often all you need is the know-how of the hired talent.

cyanydeezabout 5 hours ago
yeah, America is totally out there respecting international law.

"problem" indeed.

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rahimnathwaniabout 6 hours ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49446422

(281 points, 118 comments)

Mohamed_Mansour39 minutes ago
It is totally fine I think
AnodicElegyabout 5 hours ago
Artificial Analysis benchmark is out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49450353
hxiiabout 4 hours ago
In my brief testing, it did about as well as Qwen3.8-4B-Distill, and LFM2.5-2.6B overtook both.
kburmanabout 5 hours ago
offtopic: Is there any chance we could see competing models from other countries in the next 5 years?
svachalekabout 3 hours ago
Chinese universities are really a huge advantage, even in the US many of the top staff in model development are Chinese. Another big thing is the hardware costs required to train models. Between those two factors it really looks like this will remain a US-China competition for the foreseeable future, although there are some other players like Mistral from France.
swingboyabout 6 hours ago
How much is the “discounted” pricing they mention?
xenaabout 1 hour ago
50%
beanntabout 3 hours ago
Is it good compare to Opus 5 ?
Destinerabout 6 hours ago
from the article, pareto frontier for open source models is completely dominated by GLM now.
montroserabout 6 hours ago
Well, it will be interesting to see where Qwen3.8-Flash-Next ends up landing, also released today. These are exciting times!
Lalabadieabout 5 hours ago
I find GLM's idea of fast/flash is not really competitive with the speed DS4 Flash has, and it's hard to see them as being in the same segment for that reason.
knollimarabout 3 hours ago
Even vision? Thought k3 might have an edge there
jdw64about 4 hours ago
This was the ox-alpha model, right? I remember it performed really well for a model that had 'flash' in its name.
scottfitsabout 4 hours ago
so is it confirmed if this is the mysterious OxAlpha model?
Gander5739about 4 hours ago
Yes; if you try to use Ox Alpha it will give an error saying it waa trial period, and that it is GLM 5.3 flash.
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tokaiabout 5 hours ago
Why is their own coding plan always the last place z.ai release their models? Its even online, you just have to guess the model settings.
woadwarrior01about 2 hours ago
Captive audience.
Imustaskforhelpabout 6 hours ago
> To overcome the relatively limited compute and memory capacity of individual chips, we built a dedicated inference engine for this architecture on top of SGLang. Notably, this effort was accelerated by our GLM-5.3-powered infrastructure agent, which assisted engineers in developing and optimizing kernels, diagnosing performance bottlenecks, and improving the serving stack — creating a feedback loop in which the model helped optimize the system serving the model itself.

> (...) Compared with our initial baseline on the same hardware, we achieved a 3× improvement in end-to-end serving performance, reaching hardware efficiency and per-token cost comparable to mainstream NVIDIA GPUs. This demonstrates that Chinese chips can support frontier-model inference efficiently and economically at scale.

It might be one of the most actually practical tasks that AI might've done because the compounding effects of it and also its implications are/feels so immense. It feels as if Nvidia might be in a slight turbulence from it.

kayleykiwiabout 6 hours ago
This looks like it goes hard, can't wait to try it
VirusNewbieabout 3 hours ago
It looks like gemini 3.7 flash actually beats it in a lot of benchmarks, no?

https://x.com/Zai_org/status/2092616204787626030/photo/1

toppyabout 6 hours ago
By clicking this link you download some PDF in the background
krystofeeabout 6 hours ago
Its displayed in the html...
knowaveragejoeabout 4 hours ago
Any providers hosting it outside of China?
xenaabout 1 hour ago
Right now there's at least two: https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.3-flash

Give it a day or two. More will pop up.

svachalekabout 3 hours ago
I don't see anyone other than ZAI yet but GLM 5.2 is available on many providers worldwide so I'd expect we'll see the same on this one soon.
tinyhouseabout 5 hours ago
Anthropic is accelerating their IPO cause they know what's coming in the next 5 years.
dakolliabout 5 hours ago
I didn't accept a single edit from this model over the entire week, just saying. I do not understand how it's being benchmarked on par with Sol and other larger models.
jazzpush2about 3 hours ago
It was certainly almost RL-fried to overfit the benchmarks, at the expense of actual usability. See Opus 5.
respectattentioabout 3 hours ago
is it a benchmarkmaxxing model?!