It seems to really be a nice step-up and is getting quite close to the frontier. I wish they'd start focusing on the reasoning efficiency now, though. I have a simple (relatively) test task to evaluate LLMs: writing a simple math evaluator library in Nim (it's about 400-600 lines total max), and GLM 5.2 (xhigh which maps to max effort) spent over 15 minutes (!) reasoning, spending about 45k tokens, before it finally wrote the first file.
I know it's hard to improve on that, but now that their models are good enough at raw intelligence, I think this should become a higher priority task.
Currently on https://artificialanalysis.ai/#output-tokens GPT 5.5 xhigh spends 16k tokens total on average, GPT 5.5 high is 10k, Fable 5 33k, Opus 4.8 41k, GLM 5.2 is 42k. GPT 5.5 is extremely reasoning efficient.
Of course if you convert those values to actual request cost, GLM 5.2 will probably beat GPT 5.5/Opus 4.8, but speed matters for a lot of people, I think.
> It seems to really be a nice step-up and is getting quite close to the frontier.
IMHO it's already surpassed them. I vastly prefer my personal GLM and OpenCode setup to the Claude Code and Opus one that I have to use at work. The former makes way fewer StackOverflow brogrammer-tier mistakes and is considerably better at following instructions. The harness UX is also vastly superior as it doesn't ignore, randomly change, or incorrectly report settings.
Maybe it's the harness and I'd have even greater success with OpenCode and Anthropic, but I think it safe to say that Anthropic's moat is evaporating.
GLM 5.2 Max = Opus 4.8 Max in thinking behavior. The thinking chain is so similar, and so is the amount of token usage on the output.
If you want reasonable token usage, you need to run it GLM 5.2 at High. There is little drop in quality from Max to High (for most tasks). And it cuts token usage by 2 a 2.5x. GLM 5.2, Max is really something you only need for complex tasks.
In essence, GLM 5.2 is Opus 4.8 its little brother, at a way, WAY cheaper price.
There has been really no training on Opus models going on, really, none i tell you! /sarcasm
distillation of thinking models is not particularly effective - both "Open"AI and Misanthropic don't show you the real chain of thought, only its severely downscaled version. both do everything in their power to combat such outrageous copyright infringement, so the bulk of unethically scrapped data the Chinese have is from several generations ago.
The companies that did copyright infringement and unethically scrapped data think that copyright infringement and unethically scrapping data is wrong and needs to be stopped.
Though only in particular situations, like when it’s done to them and not when they do it. Cause they have the power and are morally right and know better than you. And if you question this at all, well you’re a threat to American values and a supporter of the Chinese and leading to the break down of Democracy.
This isn’t a type of reasoning argument or manipulation tactic used by the rich throughout history to trick the naive and gullible masses or anything like that. Trust me, I’m rich and I’m morally right. /sarcasm
With such ridiculously long thinking traces I'm surprised max outperforms high. After all, performance falls off a hill after a certain amount of context, and long thinking traces can fill that up really quickly.
In this paper they nerf an LLMs ability to emit waffling thinking tokens like "wait", "but", "alternatively", and the models (they're old, small models in the paper) terminate reasoning faster and perform better. I bet Anthropic is tuning this on their backend.
I usually have Claude build a plan first, then I put it into an XML file it updates with phases, usually we talk about some of those tasks, and then once its good and I like it, I have Claude implement the plan.
Another thing I tell Claude to do is to not guess, but look at documentation, it messes up a lot less, might use some tokens reading docs, but at least it has a higher success rate code wise.
Apparently because of how Claude is trained, even the system level prompts go through as XML, it works better with XML "prompting" so I figured I could have it write plans in XML. I need to update my ticketing tool to output XML maybe by default.
Comments later in thread say markdown works just as fine and that it’s more important to organize your plan into sections.
Also just think about it, why would a model trained on the world’s corpus of text (that isnt formatted in xml) perform better with XML? It would be a better study if that post tested markdown, org, xml, json, etc. 10 times to see if their is a difference
Seriously. Whenever I read the thinking output I get mad and turn down effort to medium or low.
Just output the code and we’ll work through it!
I feel similarly about having codex review claude’s plans. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it catch a major issue. It just points out things that would have inevitably been addressed during implementation anyway.
A lot of times this is how humans work. Just start 'putting words on paper', 'think by doing', etc. sometimes it's more efficient to see why something won't work after writing a bit of it, and sometimes you get lucky and it works right off the bat
Could it be possible, these firms are optimizing for two things: a) Better performance. b) Gathering data from you to further improve performance later. I've also found the huge amount of planning rather than iteration frustrating. I've felt like I'm teaching a junior!
I think they simply optimize around E2E benchmarks, none of those benchmarks is designed as multi turn assistance to the user, but going from a prompt straight to the final solution.
I think they are optimizing for one-shot performance because that will drive usage. They can’t afford to look bad in the benchmarks. And if that means consuming an order of magnitude more tokens, well, that’s good for business, too.
I've been having success with Opus but you REALLY have to tame it. Long prompts that list what files to look at, relationships between entities, etc... I went from regularly hitting my daily limit to almost never hitting it. Oh, and also I was being lazy with small changes and stopping that helped a lot too. As you said, it gets in these loops where it's just churning and if you don't stop it it can go on for way too long.
That's interesting. I gave nearly the same task to Gemma4 31b as a test yesterday. Write a symbolic math engine in Typescript that can perform evaluation and simple expression reductions over +-/*(). It performed the task correctly with minimal reasoning - much fewer reasoning tokens than output tokens.
Tbh, so what? I googled "symbolic math engine in Typescript that can perform evaluation and simple expression reductions over +-/*()" and got what looks to be viable answers without using any AI model at all. Reciting well established things from memory isn't terribly interesting. Show it a novel codebase and have it implement something within it.
> Of course if you convert those values to actual request cost, GLM 5.2 will probably beat GPT 5.5/Opus 4.8, but speed matters for a lot of people, I think.
GLM5.2 ends up being far more expensive than I thought it would be when I tried it on openrouter. I ground through $5 USD worth of tokens quite quickly.
I agree. I've noticed that it is quite smart but it has a tendency to doubt itself and overthink. I monitor its internal dialogue and prod it when it does this. They need to optimize the chain of thought early stopping.
I have a script that ranks these based on codingindex from Artificial Analysis.
All it does is pull a json from their main table page and parses it with the fields I care about (coding).
There used to be a mailing list associated with it but eh ... there wasn't much interest. I use the script every day though.
Current partial output
score age size name
47.1 58 large Kimi K2.6
47.5 54 large DeepSeek V4 Pro (Reasoning, Max Effort)
47.5 70 - Muse Spark
47.6 132 - Claude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)
47.8 205 - Claude Opus 4.5 (Reasoning)
48.1 132 - Claude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)
48.6 55 - GPT-5.5 (Non-reasoning)
48.7 188 - GPT-5.2 (xhigh)
50.1 29 - Qwen3.7 Max
50.7 1 large GLM-5.2 (max)
50.9 120 - Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)
51.5 92 - GPT-5.4 mini (xhigh)
52.1 55 - GPT-5.5 (low)
52.5 62 - Claude Opus 4.7 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)
53.1 132 - GPT-5.3 Codex (xhigh)
53.1 62 - Claude Opus 4.7 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)
55.5 118 - Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview
56.2 55 - GPT-5.5 (medium)
56.7 20 - Claude Opus 4.8 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)
57.2 104 - GPT-5.4 (xhigh)
58.5 55 - GPT-5.5 (high)
59.1 55 - GPT-5.5 (xhigh)
62 8 - Claude Fable 5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Opus 4.8 Fallback)
* open models are on about a 4-7 month lag right now depending on how you want to measure it
* if this keeps up, you might see an open-weights model doing claude fable 5 level work before the new year.
if people sign up for the free mailing list (that just does this) I'll go and put it back on ... emails when new model evals drop - it was pretty useful.
rank score age size name
1 62.0 8 - Claude Fable 5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Opus 4.8 Fallback)
2 59.1 55 - GPT-5.5 (xhigh)
3 58.5 55 - GPT-5.5 (high)
4 57.2 104 - GPT-5.4 (xhigh)
5 56.7 20 - Claude Opus 4.8 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)
6 55.5 118 - Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview
7 53.1 62 - Claude Opus 4.7 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)
8 53.1 132 - GPT-5.3 Codex (xhigh)
9 52.5 62 - Claude Opus 4.7 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)
10 51.5 92 - GPT-5.4 mini (xhigh)
11 50.9 120 - Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)
12 50.7 1 large GLM-5.2 (max)
13 50.1 29 - Qwen3.7 Max
14 48.7 188 - GPT-5.2 (xhigh)
15 48.1 132 - Claude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)
16 47.8 205 - Claude Opus 4.5 (Reasoning)
17 47.6 132 - Claude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)
18 47.5 70 - Muse Spark
19 47.5 54 large DeepSeek V4 Pro (Reasoning, Max Effort)
20 47.1 58 large Kimi K2.6
21 47.1 29 - Gemini 3.5 Flash (minimal)
22 46.7 449 - Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview (Mar' 25)
23 46.5 211 - Gemini 3 Pro Preview (high)
24 46.5 16 - Qwen3.7 Plus
25 46.4 120 - Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)
26 45.6 5 large Kimi K2.7 Code
27 45.6 104 - GPT-5.4 (low)
28 45.5 56 large MiMo-V2.5-Pro
29 45.1 43 - GPT-5.5 Instant (May 2026)
30 45.0 29 - Gemini 3.5 Flash (high)
31 44.9 58 - Qwen3.6 Max Preview
32 44.7 216 - GPT-5.1 (high)
33 44.2 188 - GPT-5.2 (medium)
34 44.2 126 large GLM-5 (Reasoning)
35 43.9 92 - GPT-5.4 nano (xhigh)
36 43.4 71 large GLM-5.1 (Reasoning)
37 43.4 16 large MiniMax-M3
38 43.2 54 large DeepSeek V4 Pro (Reasoning, High Effort)
39 43.0 188 - GPT-5.2 Codex (xhigh)
40 42.9 76 - Qwen3.6 Plus
41 42.9 205 - Claude Opus 4.5 (Non-reasoning)
42 42.6 182 - Gemini 3 Flash Preview (Reasoning)
43 42.2 99 - Grok 4.20 0309 (Reasoning)
44 42.1 56 large MiMo-V2.5
45 41.9 91 large MiniMax-M2.7
46 41.4 91 - MiMo-V2-Pro
47 41.3 121 large Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Reasoning)
48 41.0 48 - Grok 4.3 (high)
49 40.5 71 - Grok 4.20 0309 v2 (Reasoning)
50 40.5 342 - Grok 4
51 39.8 54 large DeepSeek V4 Flash (Reasoning, High Effort)
A longer curated list based on kristopolous’ list, with more models included. For each model, I kept only the two highest-scoring entries. I used DeepSeek V4 Flash as the cutoff, since I consider it the lowest acceptable model that is still locally deployable.
Surprised to see MiniMax M3 so low on that list, not really my experience, I found it smarter than Gemini for a lot of things, that's for sure.
Also surprised to see Gemini 3.1 ranked that high there. It remains IMHO blatantly incompetent for tool use even in their own harnesses, so I can only assume this benchmark isn't ranking workflow things very high. Gemini can write code just fine. It just can't work well as an agent.
GLM 5.2 and Qwen3.7 max were from my experience fairly expensive to use on a per token price and hard to argue in favour of when the SOTA coding plans have a fixed price that makes them potentially more cost effective. (Yes I know z.ai has a coding plan but I've heard reliability nightmare stories, and it's not very cheap)
DeepSeek is clearly the best value for $$. With the right harness and prompting.
- GPT 5.5 consistently the best, an opinion who gets me constant downvotes here by the Anthropic Marketeer strike force...
- China is going to eat the US lunch on AI
- What have European universities and companies been doing?
Its like if, on a parallel past/future, Nikola Tesla and
Edison would have created flying Cyberpunk machines,
while Europeans researchers, would be getting together to
request EU funds, for investigation on how to
breed faster horses.
- If Zuckerberg could be fired, after spending
a total of $235 billion on AI and having
NOTHING to show for...should he be fired?
None of these models come from universities, European or otherwise.
Mistral is clearly currently not competing for Frontier Model. Whether this is due to a lack of VC Funds or a lack of technical ability or the former arising from the latter would be interesting to know.
The top models are from startups. Among the FAANG only Google managed to get a Frontier model, and they litterally invented the architecture and have more money than they can possibly spend to throw at the problem. Facebook shows that even ungodly amounts of money don't get you there though.
So why did no EU based Startups succeed while two US start ups succeeded? I agree that that's a very important question the EU should ask. The Internet revolution was driven by US companies, and now AI will be as well, with Chinese Open Weights mixed in. The EU consistently can not turn its considerable economic output into fast moving tech firms.
Mistral have moved to actually trying to make money, and been relatively successful; at least if we lived in a normal world.
They've got a heap of contractors working to help industry adopt LLMs. It is just classic consulting work, and they'd look like a really great company if we weren't comparing them to literal $2T+ companies losing money hand-over-fist...
IBM doesn't do technology they do contracts. Any "technology" is marketing stunts. They hire a bunch of "fellows" outside contractors to make a thing they can be first at or whatever, do the stunt, then get a bunch of 5-10 year contracts with customers off the stunt. They then fuck it up for that length of time but still get paid due to those contracts. After that space of time the folks theyve burned have moved on, rinse repeat. Pretty easy to look back at the timeline of "firsts" they have and see the pattern.
Agree that IBM has no excuse. Specially for how long they have been trying to do AI. Although Watson was a completely different technology.
They had to start from scratch, but dont seem to have the management to be smart enough, to stop doing it in house. They could have just acquired a startup that could build a frontier model.
What is also very ironic since their whole bussiness for the last 15 years, has been buying companies a la CA Associates...
Their previous Watson branding and collapse of Watson expectations cost them one CEO, but the current CEO was part of the same team. They just dont learn....
I view Watson in the same light as Deep Blue, one-offs that brought more prestige and potential share value to IBM than necessarily "moving the needle" in the respective technology.
To be honest, living in Switzerland and speaking with peers, we're just exhausted by the constant AI hype. For a lot of us, the fact that Europe isn't frantically trying to scrape the entire internet and every book in existence for the next massive model isn't a bad thing. The big players are doing their thing, like with the nuclear arms race. We regulate a lot, too much a lot of the time, but sometimes that trickles down to other places too. A lot was done right, imo.
ETH Zurich and EPFL universities recently put out an open model called Apertus (was on the HN front page a few months back), it's not a frontier model, but they built it properly regarding copyright and data transparency.
It might look a bit slow or old-fashioned, but focusing on doing things ethically and legally feels like a much better path than just joining the race to scrape everything.
Sir, I would suggest that if Europe fails to be economically competitive, the downstream implications on European society will produce much worse outcomes than (for instance) data transparency…
Doing things with ethical intentions does not necessarily produce outcomes that are beneficial for society at large.
I'm inclined to agree with you, but you could make the same argument for exploiting natural resources and the environment. I don't think it's being done right at the moment, and it does not seem to be benefiting people as much as certain companies.
Europoor is not doing anything. If your lack of AI progress is caused by regulations and respect for IP laws, how about EVs, robotics, drones, batteries, quantum computing. Also slowed down by your over regulations? LOL.
Europoor is called Europoor for a reason, your attitude here is the best explanation on how it happened.
Mo Bitar said something like "Meta's LLM is the one you use if you accidentially hit the wrong button in WhatsApp. Its user base is fat-finger phone users."
Understood - they're just doing other things. Maybe custom ad rewriting for a target audience or some kind of deep analytics insight into user behavior or translations that optimizes for maximizing purchasing habits over literary accuracy ... I'm just saying their incentives are elsewhere and maybe Muse is serving them well.
I mean that is the smart move here. Focus the model on optimizing the core business. For Meta, that's not coding tools.
I would imagine it will be a fundamental breakthrough, not weights alone, that are going to usher in the next generation of AI. Perhaps China will in fact make that breakthrough. They certainly seem to have a lot of eyeballs in the field right now.
There has really been one break-through, the actual construction of giant LLMs from the available titanic corpus of text. Even that barely involved much conceptual breakthrough, a few things maybe e.g. transformer. Basically it was a question of the accessibility of a) giant internet corpus of actual people actually saying stuff and b) adequate computing power. The witty surface training, the scaffolding for a chatbot is what made a universal stir. With this, though, we are done with revolutionary breakthroughs. Training for coding involves actual alteration of weights - and as it improves the general utility of the corresponding models will fail. In the end it will be a domain of specialized models. The improvement of this aspect via RLVR etc is what caused a general mania in the programmer milieu.
There is a lot of money in pretending that we are seeing unending revolutions.
I think they are already massively winning on efficiency... which is about to matter a lot as the frontier models jack up their prices in order to some day see a profit (and no, Anthropic getting massively subsidized by Elon out of spite doesn't count for long term profits).
I also get the downvotes for the GPT thing, and agree with you about 5.5's quality, but TBH I don't think it's Anthropic marketing as just two other things:
1. SamA and his company has a well-deserved bad reputation and Anthropic got some early good PR for basically not being SamA.
2. Claude Code got early head space, Boris and crew basically "invented" this kind of agent, and so has first mover advantage despite its known reliability and cost issues.
3. Most people I talk to haven't even tried Codex for some reason
I downvoted you for your complaining about downvotes fwiw.
And Zuck hasn't spent that much on AI yet. Half of that is projected spending for 2026.
As to whether it's all for nothing, Q1 2026 revenue was up 33% over Q1 last year, driven largely by...better AI-driven ad targeting. So the spending doesn't seem that crazy to me.
Well Europe is famously a laggard when it comes to new tech - in parts of Switzerland, two horses were required be mounted in front to carry cars up until 1925. UK required a person to walk in front of a car and wave a red flag.
As evil as Google is as a company these days [cough disclaimer, used to work here, so biased] I can't help but think that if Gemini didn't... suck, and if they had a coding model at the same quality as GPT 5.5 or Opus 4.8 they'd be completely cleaning up purely on the basis of relative reputations of the companies.
That Google is dropping the ball so badly, or just disinterested in the coding side of things... is either a sign of incompetence, or a lack of interest in losing money in that space. I wish I knew which.
add an argument (any argument) and it will be sorted as your specified. It just works as a toggle flipping the order ... so literally any string will do.
The original link has been updated accordingly with the new code.
Because it's currently 511 lines. Why would I want to scroll up to see the stuff I care about? Don't you want the relevant stuff to be right there in front of you?
But maybe you decide you want to see more. It makes perfect sense for a cli tool to output the most interesting piece of info last: then you can decide on the fly whether you want to scroll up or not.
Because programmers can’t figure out how to have a CLI that prints in a normal order, with the newest stuff on top instead of on the bottom.
Setup a fresh new large monitor. Open CLI. Run command. Watch output at the bottom of your screen. Keep watching the bottom of your screen for the rest of the day.
Sure you can tile windows and it helps but come on. Just have the command/input section in the bottom and the “output” on top. Keep the command bit on the bottom.
Artificial Analysis coding benchmark shows GLM5.1 on high pretty close to GPT5.5 xhigh in cost to run, with GPT5.5 on medium significantly less expensive. Compared to GPT5.5 medium GLM5.1xhigh is twice the cost and half the intelligence. They don't have GLM5.2 on there yet, but that'd a big gap to bridge.
I thought I was "holding it wrong" until DeepSWE came along -- personally it seems to match my own experiences pretty well. Really makes me wonder how legitimate some of the internet noise is about open models. There's surely some use cases for them, not everything needs the absolute frontier (GPT5.5 on low is awesome), but if you want to be near the frontier everyone needs to be honest about the fact that we're only talking about Opus, Fable, GPT5.5.
with open models you can get a subscription with privacy, at the same cost as codex.
openai, google and anthropic subscriptions are not available with privacy.
looking at the link there it's interesting that going from cursor cli to codex cli take gpt 5.5 from 7th to 3rd. but they didn't do open model in codex.
so, hard to say it's for sure a model benchmark. maybe open models are just shit at swe agent harness...it's not the most parsimonious explanation though.
however the legal terms are different, openai reads your data. they store it for 30 days, but of course once it hits the disk you can keep as long as you like in a civil case like nyt v openai.
the same for google and anthropic. so, it's not always nice if someone is paid to read your data for safety. people upload sensitive matters, personal videos and so on.
i wouldn't prioritise it myself but you can also know that the data will all come out in discovery if you are in a legal issue. maybe that's not important, but people thought it did matter to give some protections to patient records, legal advice and therapy. you upload that to gpt and it goes into discovery.
DeepSWE “feels” like the right benchmark in comparison to Artificial Analysis indices and other coding benchmarks. And by their metrics, GPT-5.5 is still king in token efficiency, speed, and overall intelligence per dollar.
I gave GLM 5.2 a spin on openrouter yesterday and it was mostly fine but it racked up $5 in token use in 30 minutes of (relatively slow) work.
It's easily 4x the cost of DeepSeek V4 but I didn't actually feel the results were that much better. I had GPT 5.5 in Codex review it after it was done and there was plenty of slop to go around.
Having better luck with MiniMax M3, from a cost/benefit ratio.
I really like DeepSeek V4 Pro. It's pretty smart and I get so much usage out of it on a $20 Ollama cloud plan.
With a good harness, that's my favorite model for any personal project. I use Opus 4.8 at work because i don't have to pay for it and of course I love it, but DeepSeek is like 80% there for one tenth of the price.
AI review generally will find fault in anything. Any non-trivial code has multiple solutions with different tradeoffs. Any code can be over-engineered for theoretical edge cases and future use cases you don't need. No matter which solution you pick you can always at a minimum say that some alternative just looks and reads better.
Code is somewhat artistic. If you don't have well defined standards and priorities, the AI review cycle can spiral infinitely figuratively debating what makes art good, and your code will be no better for it.
This is correct, but I'd say there's something beyond that that's more specific about Codex + GPT models though. They've done some sort of training that makes it far more diligent about seeking out data races, unhandled errors / negative cases, and missing test coverage than the other models I've played with. It also seems more prone to testing its hypothesis.
This makes it slower to work with for prototyping, and it will, if not properly disciplined, litter your code with "legacy adapters" and "bridge code" and temporary incremental refactoring steps [arguably not terrible for work in real commercial software projects]. And it will create too many unit & integration tests, if you're not careful.
But it does, in my opinion, tend to produce more reliable software and I trust it far more than I did when I was working in Claude.
When I could afford it, I had both plans running, Claude to produce new features, and then Codex to brutally critique it battle test it, sharpen the edges, and produce better tests, and this flow went extremely well.
Now I just work with Codex and various open models.
That's what I love about it, and I wish I could find an open model that was as diligent.
Somehow it's just way more careful than the others, and also much better at empirical verification of its hypothesis, writing tests, etc. I am assuming a lot of RL done on that kind of flow, and on seeking out negative cases, failure points, race conditions.
Why aren't more people talking about this? It's literally Opus 4.7 quality stupid prices. I know providers who are offering this at unlimited tokens for $50 a month. Some are even offering API rates at 3x lower than the official ZAI api rates which are already like 10x cheaper than Opus. (Crof and Umans btw)
This is a huge blow to Anthropic/OpenAI/Google and a massive win for the rest of the world. The official API prices and speeds mean nothing for open source models.
> Some are even offering API rates at 3x lower than the official ZAI api rates
Looking at openrouter [1], some of the cheaper offerings are for quantized models. Not sure how much intelligence is lost in quantization. And they are not 3 times cheaper. Where did you find 3x lower prices for APIs? I am considering skipping open router and using them directly for that price.
IME, unquantised -> FP8 is pretty much lossless. What matters more is having an unquantized KV cache - using an FP8 KV cache can result in a significant drop in quality.
I've seen a few articles from providers talking about KV cache quantisation, but it's not something they explicitly point out like they do with weights.
So you could end up paying more for unquantised weights, only to get silently hit with a quantised KV cache...
Neuralwatt ... When you reverse calculate the actual energy usage / price on a token basis, the gap is large.
I do not have GLM 5.2 numbers because the whole default max setting is overkill. But GLM 5.1 numbers had it at 12x cheaper then API rates. And about 2.5x more tokens vs zai their own subscription service.
Yes, its FP8 but lets be honest, do we know for sure that even zai runs at FP16? I learned a long time ago with Claude and Codex how much cheating happens on model levels, even from the big boys.
Please correct me if you have contradicting data but: Neuralwatt's price per token vs price for energy comparison doesn't seem to take into account the cost savings from cache hits that other providers offer on pure token rates. The comparison seems to assume every input token is a cache miss.
On top of that, the cloud offering doesn't seem that well-run, they randomly blocked a colleague's API key for a couple days without any heads up, had a weird rate limiting bug and they have been deprecating models without redirects with very short notice, all while taking weeks to onboard new models. I assume some of these problems would be addressed if we had an SLA/enterprise contract.
It's a promising idea though. They offer a $5 trial credit (with an aggressive rate limit) though so no harm in trying it out.
Be careful about unofficial providers, a lot of them misconfigure models or stealth quantize them. For a while the difference between Kimi on the official API and most third party providers was 20-40%.
To answer the question in your first sentence - because it's VERY computationally (ha) expensive as a human being to keep up with all the options. It's also very hard to figure out how to run a model like this. There's no installer. If you really really care, which 99% of people do not, you have to google a guide, and then find out it's out of date...
I've tried a number of these, and the learning curve is very steep compared to "install Claude Code and pay $100/mo". There is no way saving me $50/month matters compared to figuring that out.
You're seriously suggesting that setting up opencode or tweaking your claude code config or etc is too much trouble to be worth saving $50 /mo? That's absurd. Doubly so when the audience in question is already using LLMs so ... just ask your existing LLM for help if it seems daunting.
I'm not just suggesting that, I'm trying to be crystal clear: it's a gap that probably cuts TAM by 95% or more. Most LLM users are not software engineers. Even those that are don't care enough to muck with their settings to try out a model. Keep in mind I'm not answering the question "Is this hard to install?" - I'm answering the question "Why aren't people talking about this?"
I would broadly agree with this (based on years of dealing directly with user-facing UX and setup steps). Small hurdles, even easy ones, create larger barriers to adoption then you’d think.
For me it's about tolerance. When I was 13, I could and would customize everything, so much that the computer repair shop told my father that their son "likely is a hacker or something".
At 40, I could easily configure claude code to use another model, even if there weren't any official guides with a bit of MITM fun, but I don't want to invest my attention / heavily use something that will most likely break in the near future.
Here are a few frictions I see that reduce reach, in order:
1) You haven't even heard of it.
2) You have to know to look for both GLM and Z.ai. These are usually in the same article when reporting about GLM is written, at least.
3) You have to understand there could be a benefit in trying it; you have to want to try it for some reason. Their own blog post puts it below Opus 4.8 in each of the three benchmarks they used.
4) You have to figure out the pricing, which isn't obviously in the blog post...
5) When I first went to Z.ai, I got an error popup (not logged in): "You do not have permission to access this resource. Please contact your administrator for assistance." I am using a personal computer...
6) When I typed something in the resultant field and pressed enter, I got "Clear Current Chat? To start a new chat, your current conversation will be discarded. Sign in to save chats"
I think today's article helped with 1 and 2, which helps their top of funnel. But they're fighting a big uphill battle.
In my org everyone is extremely Claude-pilled to the point you’d think it’s the only LLM that exists, purely because it caters to non-engineers within enterprises.
Wasn't this released like 2 days ago? Everyone is still evaluating and playing around with it, things like the submission is just starting to come out. Give it some days at least before jumping to conclusions, ideally weeks.
Do you have benchmarks or at least anecdotes to back that up? I'm not arguing with you; I would just love to see some proof that open models are getting as good as Anthropic's models.
look at benchmarks, use the model yourself. Im usually first to call BS on every chinese model that says they are as good as Opus. this is finally the first one that actually is. It is a massive jump from every other previous chinese model.
I wish I had the time to set it up and work on side projects but unfortunately life and work have been crazy (as I'm sure many here feel). That's why I asked for anecdotes about it.
My Mac Studio uses about 60–80 watts whenever I’m running a model (as measured by the system metrics), so it’s less than 2 kWh/day at full blast. Electricity is like 0.125 €/kWh, so that 24-hour period would be <0.25 €.
Not accounting hardware in my costs, since I didn’t buy my hardware for running models. Running models is just something it can do in addition to what I got it for.
imho everything but opus produces unusable code (fable was even better...), eg gpt5.5 seems to write the absolute worst code that still technically solves the problem; tbh I'd be totally willing to trade "raw intelligence" for "code taste"
more labs need to figure out whatever anthropic did to destroy everybody else on frontiercode bench
Opus has the nickname "Slopus" in a lot of circles for a reason. It can write nice code in isolation, but the way it organizes that code and its rigor in addressing edge cases/making sure things are robust leave a lot to be desired. Opus is particularly famous for having a real problem reinventing stuff that already existed in the codebase because it wanted to get to work before exploring sufficiently.
what you're describing doesn't sound like such a big deal -- it's (A) obvious during review, (B) easy to fix in a single prompt, (C) simple enough to fix manually, (D) can be mitigated with tokenmaxxing (agent review passes, prompting, subagents, etc)
regarding edge cases -- less is more in my experience, as removing is harder than adding
GLM 5.2 is the first model we've tested that is unambiguously on par with, or better than Opus 4.6 (although as usual, we have GLM 5.2 and most other Chinese models a bit below most other benchmarks with more vulnerable test methodologies).
I've been playing with this model a fair amount over the last 24 hours, and I can confirm it's quite capable, while being a little bit verbose (I've seen it reconsider things 3-4 times in thinking traces before deciding on a path forward), and not being quite as good as GPT5.5 at working through complex abstract requirements.
Honestly it's good enough that I feel comfortable recommending a Z.AI sub + a $20/mo OpenAI sub for all but the most AI pilled multi-orchestrators, or the die hard Claude fans. GLM writing + GPT reviewing/debugging feels pretty unlimited and minimally worse than just doing everything in GPT with the $200/mo plan.
This is honestly what I care bout the most now, which is how well they can write. I think we have reached a point now, if you know how to program, you can provide enough information for the models to pretty much do what you need.
What they still struggle immensely with is the writing which has too many nuances but they are truly getting better.
After having got a taste of Fable 5 for me Opus 4.8 doesn't cut it any more -- and I don't know how to put this, I don't know if it's just me, but it's rhetorical flourishes are starting to really grate on me, never mind that it is at times deliberately weasel-wordy and economical with the truth until pressed. Opus 4.8 is definitely a stronger coding agent than DeepSeek 4.0 or Kimi 2.7 succeeding where they flounder and fail but its way of expressing itself conversationally is making me reconsider my subscription …
GPT 5.5 xhigh is smarter than Fable but Fable like Opus 4.8 as well is faster and seems more “agentic”. It’s easy to test this. Build a fairly complex software with Claude(opus or Fable).
Review the commits with both Claude and GPT 5.5 Xhigh. You can see that Fable is still sloppy(er) compared to GPT. You can test it the other way around as well(drive the dev with GPT and review with GPT and Claude). You get the same result
Claude has an edge though and that’s on building more beautiful user interfaces.
Knowing very little about how to run these, how close are we to medium or larger businesses starting to buy hardware to run models like this to keep the models local?
It’s expensive, and not as capable as the frontier models, but would have some pretty big benefits around privacy and agency.
I know of multiple businesses in Europe that have been doing that for a while with 70B models, and are upgrading hardware to run the new crop of 700B-1T models (really started around Kimi K2, but buying and hosting that kind of hardware takes time)
Not everyone is willing (or even legally able) to send their trade secrets to OpenAI or Anthropic
While certainly there are such cases with trade secrets, it's worth noting that even large banks typically have a provider like Azure or AWS onboarded.
There they can deploy these models while using the existing legal frameworks.
Nvidia will sell you an entire server rack ready for inference. Or maybe you can roll out your own Blackwell based system.
We’re approaching a world where running a primer frontier model is possible on a workstation, probably will have something under $30k that looks like a desktop for Nvidia’s next generation. It sounds expensive, until you look at your Anthropic bill.
It’s similar unit economics as could computing for the open models. You can save a ton on the expenses by buying the hardware, but it requires a lot of in-house expertise, and you get the most value if you keep the system operating around the clock. The big kink is open models are usually 2 quarters behind frontier, and your competitors are probably trying to get access to mythos.
"approaching" is doing some work there. $30K today will get you 90-144GB usable VRAM with solid system RAM and disk and CPU. A single B200 chip at 180GB is $40K. Unfortunately that is nowhere close to being able to run a 750B param model. For something like that, we're getting closer to 1TB VRAM (8+ H200/B200), and then 1M context KV cache is many more GBs on top of that.
That's a $500K-$1M+ rig as of now. That's a lot of $200 subscriptions to break even, but reasonable if you are paying Anthropic $25/M tokens. Then of course there's the power, cooling, and maintenance to consider...
But yeah, I can see if the prices come down 10x in a few years, or crater after the bubble, $30-40k might get you a decent machine.
> Unfortunately that is nowhere close to being able to run a 750B param model. For something like that, we're getting closer to 1TB VRAM
You don't have to run a model from VRAM, or even from a sizeable amount of RAM. These choices only ever make sense when serving the model at scale, to hundreds of simultaneous users or more.
For an 8-bit quant (what people call "near lossless") you are looking at something like 4xMI350X, which comes out to about $150k after adding the rest of the server. More if you go with Nvidia instead of AMD. More if you want more than maybe 8x concurrency
But prices are changing rapidly, and not for the better
This is not a new situation. This was happening also when good vision models like alexa net were coming through, especially for OCR. Companies had choice between cloud or self hosting with GPUs. But turns out, problem is usage patterns.
Your usage will peak during certain timezone work hours(even if you are a huge multinational company most of your engineers/users tend to be from only a few locations), so then you have a bunch of gpus doing nothing the rest of the day.
especially with latency sensitive stuff, this is a decades old tradeoff problem, its not unique to llms
So far there seems to be one major use-case for complete privacy, and that is legal work. You don't need top of the line models to search vast amounts of text in discovery and it needs to be completely confidential. There's quite a few lawyers over on r/localllama showing off their multi-GPU builds. Coincidentally they also have the vast funding required for it.
Unless you have genuine national security concerns, you’d be better off just negotiating a commercial agreement with privacy protections with a couple of existing vendors.
I think that's true until it isn't, which may end up being the problem. Fable/Mythos doesn't fall under the ZDR agreements with Anthropic. And I'm curious if others will follow suit.
if you can afford the investment you get stable low costs for years with better security (at least if your cyber team is good). its even better in regulated industries where some vendors might add a premium for hipaa/soc/pci dss compliance to the point its a lot cheaper to self host. for a smaller business its not worth it and you should just use a hosted open model.
I was surprised that GLM 5.1/5.2 are not vision models - they are text input only.
That's actually pretty uncommon these days. All of the OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini models accept images, and so do the other leading open weight families - Gemma 4, Qwen 3.6, Kimi 2.x.
In GLM's case image input would be useful because it's a model that scores very highly for tasks like web design, but without image input it can't take a screenshot and output HTML+CSS.
Don't get me wrong, GLM is a phenomenal model, but the image thing is a bit of a gap.
Configure a subagent in your coding harness to spin up a new sub-session with any vision model for those tasks and feed the result back to the main model. No need for "one model that does everything"
I don't see this being such a big gap. There are some use-cases for sure but apart from UX/UI work it is not really needed. Besides, none of the frontier models can replicate actual images - the can approximate at least in my own experience.
> On the Intelligence vs. Cost per Task Pareto Frontier: GLM-5.2 is on the Pareto frontier of the Intelligence vs Cost per Task chart, with the lowest cost per task among models at its intelligence level. GLM-5.2 costs ~$0.46 per task, compared to GLM-5.1 ($0.25), Kimi K2.6 ($0.31), MiniMax-M3 ($0.18) and DeepSeek V4 Pro (max, $0.05)
I think they’ve just picked poor peer examples. Instead of choosing other models near 5.2 on the intelligence scale, they’ve picked some open models from further down the scale.
We have no proof in either direction, it's not like we had access to their financial numbers in details.
And the pricing itself muddies the water, as input tokens that are already in the KV cache are practically free for the provider, whereas other tokens are expensive. So they could still make money overall thanks to people having multi-turn conversation (and as such, paying multiple times for the same token), but lose money on actual compute done.
> there are lots of third party hosting services that will still run at breakeven/profit.
How can you be sure that they are making profit directly from token price, and are not billing at marginal cost (i.e. electricity price, without counting the cost of the GPUs) and aiming to make a profit later on from the valuable training data that they are collecting in the process?
You are free to believe that they are doing all this. Or you can simply believe the intuition that models are getting cheaper by the day. I can run Gemma 4 31B from my laptop today.
Sure, you can believe you intuition as much as you want, but telling strangers over the internet that they are wrong because “I trust my intuition” is… awkward.
Again, there's a difference between relying on intuition in your life (which we all do, lacking perfect information that would allow us to avoid relying on it), and telling someone they are wrong because your intuition says so.
I'm curious what harness everyone is using for these? I want to start to test some of these open models but don't know what tools people use to get these working "agenticaly"
I think the problem is, as can also be seen on other benchmarks, is that most models nowadays are focused more and more purely on tool calling and coding.
This means, that models are losing more and more general and domain-specific knowledge.
Look at those graphs on ARtificialAnalysis, GLM-5.1 still performs similarly or better:
I still feel like models are not getting any smarter for a few months already, they just changed their training to be focused more on some areas than others, so shifting the intelligence from one place to another, not necessarily increasing the overall intelligence or "AGI" score.
man, i love dsv4-flash but i found its weaknesses in complex projects with multiple moving parts. tried kimi 2.6 and it understood and could work on the task. bigger is better..
GLM 5.2 feels like Opus 4.6 level. I actually think 4.6 and GLM work better in practice than opus 4.7 or 4.8 as I find both of those more erratic and seem to randomly have a super dumb turn. That random bad turn I see doesn't seem to be hitting the benchmark scores but they make 4.7 and 4.8 very hard to use for me. GLM is more stable like opus 4.6
Probably not. Qwen3.(5|6)-27B seems like an "accidental freak". I'm not even sure they know what they did to create that. A decent amount of the team members left after that, so unfortunately, we might not be seeing another small model that packs such a punch for a while. Hopefully the team is studying their entire training recipe for that and is able to replicate. If they are, then a 50-70B dense model might give us such capabilities...
Why wait for the next few months? There are plenty of better models that you can run today locally. Qwen3.5-397B beats Qwen3.6-27B. MiniMax2.7 is a longrun horizon monster. (I haven't given 3 much of a try yet). KimiK2.6/2.7, MiMoV2.5/MiMoV2.5-Pro and GLM5.1 will wreck Qwen3.6-27B any day on any task.
Just ran and scored 63 3d model generations (via code) across high and no reasoning. 3D Modeling benchmark quickly shows spatial, logic and code performance of the model so I think it's a very good indicator of the quality.
Here are the results compared to Gemini 3.5 Flash:
Model + config CodeErr/gen Cost/gen Median time Quality
gemini-3.5-flash, low 0.71 $0.18 68s baseline
GLM 5.2, reasoning high 0.61 $0.18 289s -6.0%
GLM 5.2, reasoning off 1.52 $0.10 126s -13.6%
Although it is cheaper, it is significantly slower, and results are worse overall. Surprisingly - high reasoning produces less code errors than gemini 3.5 flash, but when I actually look at the models they are worse.
Edit: I recently ran evals with Kimi 2.7 and MiniMax-M3 and this is clearly open source SOTA model, by far.
I don't have the eval results live yet, so I cannot share them yet.
I was benchmarking using a soon to be released new version of my AI CAD modeling software[0].
It's basically an agent that has access to tools that can execute build123d scripts, get sculpted models, blender to combine sculpts + parametric models, tools to inspect the model (visually and with code), search datasheets, ...
I tried what you recommend a while ago (asking an AI to evaluate using different angles) and the AI evaluations were extremely bad - barely any correlation to what I scored. Things have gotten better, but I don't trust it enough yet.
Here is how I score adherence (and how AI did as well, but I tried methods where it would just give back a boolean "pass" or not):
<0.2 → Poor – Misses core intent; largely irrelevant or incorrect.
<0.4 → Weak – Partially relevant; significant omissions or errors.
<0.6 → Fair – Covers main points but lacks completeness or precision.
<0.8 → Good – Mostly accurate; minor gaps or deviations.
<=1.0 → Excellent – Fully aligned; precise, comprehensive, and faithful to intent.
Here is the scenario list (prompts are much more detailed):
Correct me if I'm wrong, but neither DeepSeek nor GLM have image input modality. This makes them less useful when looking at UIs, photos, screenshots, etc. doesn't it? Or do they have alternate ways of doing so?
DeepSeekv4+ will have image capability, they said so in their paper. GLM whenever they decide to. Both companies have they tech and for whatever reason haven't decide to prioritize it. Both of their OCR are SOTA among all OCR models closed or open. GLM demonstrated they know how to do this, with GLM-4.6V.
Yes, you are right (as far as I'm aware). For things where you need the LLM to look at screenshots, photos or other images you can use Kimi-K2.6/K2.7 - comparable pricing, somewhat comparable performance and quality. You can even probably combine two models (e.g Kimi and GLM) in one agent, using Kimi for multimodal inputs and GLM for everything else, although 1) I'm not sure if this will not cause some kind of context poisoning with low-quality patterns for better performing model (e.g. in some cases Kimi may be worse than GLM, but GLM, when following up, may adopt the same reasoning patterns as Kimi, undermining it's own performance), and 2) I'm not quite sure if it's possible with the tools currently available (I'm not really into agentic or chatbots stuff to be honest).
It also means that if they actually trained with vision, they'd be on par with Anthropic models as vision seems to improve model performance across the board even for non-vision tasks.
Many other open source models have vision but they don't compare to GLM in terms of coding quality. So I don't think it's because of vision that the frontier models are better, it's more that they are probably just much bigger models.
That's right, but there are other recent open weights and relatively big LLMs that are multimodal, e.g. MiniMax-M3.
With open weights LLMs, it is affordable to use many different models, each for whatever it is better.
Moreover, for analyzing "UIs, photos, screenshots, etc." there are small models that can be run locally on smartphones or laptops, e.g. IBM granite-vision-4.1-4B, certain Google Gemma 4 variants and certain Qwen variants, whose output you can use as input for a big LLM, in order to accomplish some more complex task.
Configure a subagent in your coding harness for vision, add a prompt about the vision use, configure a vision model for it, modify your main agent's prompt to use the vision subagent for vision tasks. Now your non-vision model has vision support.
This was a problem with older Qwen/MiMo/Kimi models mostly. GLM has always been on the more robust side, and newer iterations from all those labs have improved as well. The only lab I've seen regressing this way is DeepSeek, 3.2 was fairly robust but 4.0 feels more benchmaxxed.
I have used GLM since version 4.8 I think and do enjoy using them. More then other models like Kimi or Deepseek. Though only tested them on smaller private projects.
I beg to differ. I replaced a $40/mo GitHub Copilot subscription where I used Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.5 with a $10/mo opencode Go plan where I use mostly DeepSeek V4 Flash and testing MiMo 2.5.
I work on mid-sized projects currently (200k to 1kk lines of code).
You are obviously lying because it shows you have no experience with. GLM since 4.5 have been crushing it. all their models since then haven't skipped a beat. 4.5/4.5-air, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8, 5, 5.1. That aside, MiMoV2.5, MiniMax from 2.0, DeepSeek from V3, Kimi since V2, Qwen since 3, Hy3 have all been amazing models. All from China, we need to get over it. China is not losing yet as far as the AI race is concerned.
For anyone who's interested, I've put together a simple site for sharing ratings/opinions on models at a task-specific granularity. https://model.reviews/
The idea is that benchmark score comparisons are useful for a large cross-product comparison across models + their settings, but less useful if you're looking for the best model for <your-specific-task>. So I thought having a place to review and comment could be beneficial to people.
I'm not sure how best to get the corpus bootstrapped (i.e. people will likely only visit/post on the site if there's already activity), so posting it here for anyone who'd like to contribute.
I like their models, super cheap - I'm a Lite plan subscriber, and subjective performance seems to be same as lower Anthropic models, useful for lots of grunt work.
The problem is that Ziphu really __really__ struggle with capacity - everyone is complaining of timeouts or very slow speeds. I can't get direct access to the model though I see it is in OpenRouter so I may play. But the capacity issues means DeepSeek is my main provider these days
DeepSeek V4 has been quite amazing in our workloads and it operates at a fraction of the cost. I have not tried GLM 5.2 but it seems that it hits a sweet spot.
I've made a comment before that 5.1 will sometimes get stuck looping over a simple decision or statement. It will basically contradict and then not realize that one option is the definite option. Sometimes it's two statements that aren't even exclusive. Nonetheless, a lot of tokens that get wasted from this.
I haven't extensively used 5.2 yet, but it seems a lot better.
It's a surprisingly common misconception that models contain any metadata at all about themselves in their weights. If you ask them, "What model are you?" they either retrieve the answer from the system prompt, or they hallucinate an answer. Same goes for questions about knowledge cut-off, how many parameters they have, the source of their training data, etc.
These open source models need better multi-turn capabilities. They are always lacklustre in "agent mode". Whether it's just less RL, whatever, it's a worse "product". Whereas it feels like the frontier labs have been all-in on "agentic" multi-turn reasoning for a long time now.
Fun fact: Zhipu aka Z.ai, Knowledge Atlas etc., the company that made GLM, is listed on Hong Kong stock exchange, is up over 10x since the IPO at the beginning of this year.
I have a question, as it happens: Do you think the benchmarks and models were trained on benchmark datasets to skew the results, even though in real-world applications we realize they're not that great?
"open source" means that the code itself (for LLMs - this is training code) is available to the general public. "open weights" means that the weights (trained over time) are available publicly, rather than locked behind a paywalled chat. I do not know of an open source LLM that is not also open weights (unless they never bothered training it). Models like Claude and Gemini are neither open source, nor are they open weights.
This is really held back by one bench (omniscience accuracy) where it's really very far behind otherwise i think it's got at least a couple of points higher.
People always say stuff like this, but it is misleading. The reason it's misleading is because that remaining 5% makes a huge difference, and is where most of the value of using AI agents lies.
I'm not interested in using AI to write code that would have taken me 5-10 minutes to write myself. I use AI to debug complex bugs and develop large features that span multiple domains - stuff that normally takes hours, if not days/weeks. A model that is "enough for 95%" does not cut it for that, because the failures compound during long-horizon tasks and the thing becomes a mess.
I get what you mean. But for many people, AI coding is not about solving complex problems. No, they do it mostly themselves. AI coding for many is a productivity tool, where it helps you with mundane, but laborious tasks.
In my setup, I use a daily workhorse for such things. They should be fast, cheap and reasonably working well. I don’t expect it to be smart, but need it to follow instructions perfectly and handle tool calling well.
For architectural work or debugging help, I use the top models instead.
That works reasonably well for me with a low cost.
It's a real step forward, getting closer to SOTA. It seems to be very epistemically cautious in its reasoning. I hope Deepseek and the other open-weights labs stay in the game and catch up too.
Which is fine for their target market. Their latest model is Kimi K2.6, available to enterprise customers. But older models become more powerful when you have time to do more reasoning. Also many applications don't need advanced models. Cerebras is making bank from all the other use cases that SOTA providers left on the table by focusing on 0-shot intelligence over speed
Sure, but whatever you do, don't buy their (Z.ai) lite plan.
I feel like i threw 15 dollars in the sea. I'm getting rate limited after 3-4 prompts. You get way less value than just paying 25 dollars for Claude or OpenAI models.
I had the Lite plan, I NEVER maxed out the quota because I considered these things. If I, for example, switched over to GLM-5-Turbo, then I could've easily burned through quota.
I just read it and honestly it left an even worse taste in my mouth.
>GLM-5.2 and GLM-5-Turbo are advanced models designed to rival Claude Opus model. Its usage will be deducted at 3 × during peak hours and 2 × during off-peak hours.
Claude certainly does not punish me for using their best models. Why should this "up and coming" company do it?
I thought the up and coming ai companies was supposed to have some kind of leverage in terms of price/performance (see deepseeks insanely cheap V4 flash and pro).
How are you using it? I have the lite plan and I've only ever maxed my weekly usage a few hours before reset. I will concede that I'm not a super heavy LLM user but it's been really good for me.
My workflow is usually:
- read file. I want to achieve X, how do? Do not implement anything.
- I would do a, b and c
- sketch a brief implementation of your suggestion
- <code> (not writing files yet)
- instead of your approach x, wouldn't it make sense to instead do z? What would that look like?
Are you using it in an agentic workflow? Just reading the codebase will consume a lot of cached tokens, but seemingly, z.ai counts these as normal input tokens the way they're rate limiting.
I'm not entirely sure what an agentic workflow could mean today but I think so. I use a coding agent (crush), prompt it to brainstorm an implementation with me (or sometimes I know exactly how I want to implement it but ask it to challenge it), correct any wrong assumptions or request the implementation to look differently than suggested if I don't like it. Then finally when I'm positive I've cleared the most important assumptions I ask it to actually write and edit files and run tests and such (this just ends up being a "implement this").
With any model I've tried I've found it to be a huge pain to have it fix things where it made a wrong assumption without the code becoming a mess and burning a lot of tokens. I'm aware that not everyone works like this but I'm still very opinionated on what the end result should look like so I can still work on it without an LLM.
I asked z.ai what z.ai is, and it said "It seems you might be referring to xAI, as "z.ai" isn't a widely known or major AI company or platform at this time."
I have been trying out GLM 5.2 and I am really impressed by it for the most part.
To all people on Hackernews, I am curious as to what agent harness are you using it with.
Previously I was using opencode and then I switched to using Opencode + obra/superpowers and creating custom skill.md themselves for it. I found things to take more time and intervene more but the result of it has been that I have found it to work better.
Now I have also started using oh-my-pi as well and I found it to be faster compared to Opencode.
I am unsure how much of there is a difference to it and how much of things are placebo but what is your opinion regarding the best Agent harness for GLM 5.2?
Ok, it is nice to see another great open source model. Not sure what to think of all these benchmarks but GLM was already quite strong before so an update is very welcome.
I tried it today through Openrouter and the API is atrocious. I got multiple rate limit and random errors every turn.
Somebody wrote [1]; "I am never touching Minimax or GLM again. Their APIs had constant outages and I had to restart my runs multiple times — after burning money on the runs that failed midway." and I 100% agree.
The model might be good, but if the API is so bad, it's effectively useless.
The entire point of this post is that it's open weights, you can run it yourself and don't have to deal with the API issues. You really do have that choice.
You could subscribe to Anthropic/OpenAI for the rest of your life for the cost it would take to host GLM5.2 locally - you need 1.5TB of VRAM just for the weights
You don't need that much VRAM unless you're targeting a high-performance deployment that's intended to scale far beyond local use. For a lower-throughput case, you can keep the model weights on SSD at very low cost and stream them in for inference. This could actually scale reasonably well if you have something as simple as a previous-gen HEDT with a decent amount of PCIe lanes to host fast storage from.
Give it a few days and additional provider will be up and available on OpenRouter. Then the game of figuring out who’s not nuking the weights and neutering the quantization begins.
It seems to really be a nice step-up and is getting quite close to the frontier. I wish they'd start focusing on the reasoning efficiency now, though. I have a simple (relatively) test task to evaluate LLMs: writing a simple math evaluator library in Nim (it's about 400-600 lines total max), and GLM 5.2 (xhigh which maps to max effort) spent over 15 minutes (!) reasoning, spending about 45k tokens, before it finally wrote the first file.
I know it's hard to improve on that, but now that their models are good enough at raw intelligence, I think this should become a higher priority task.
Currently on https://artificialanalysis.ai/#output-tokens GPT 5.5 xhigh spends 16k tokens total on average, GPT 5.5 high is 10k, Fable 5 33k, Opus 4.8 41k, GLM 5.2 is 42k. GPT 5.5 is extremely reasoning efficient.
Of course if you convert those values to actual request cost, GLM 5.2 will probably beat GPT 5.5/Opus 4.8, but speed matters for a lot of people, I think.
> It seems to really be a nice step-up and is getting quite close to the frontier.
IMHO it's already surpassed them. I vastly prefer my personal GLM and OpenCode setup to the Claude Code and Opus one that I have to use at work. The former makes way fewer StackOverflow brogrammer-tier mistakes and is considerably better at following instructions. The harness UX is also vastly superior as it doesn't ignore, randomly change, or incorrectly report settings.
Maybe it's the harness and I'd have even greater success with OpenCode and Anthropic, but I think it safe to say that Anthropic's moat is evaporating.
GLM 5.2 Max = Opus 4.8 Max in thinking behavior. The thinking chain is so similar, and so is the amount of token usage on the output.
If you want reasonable token usage, you need to run it GLM 5.2 at High. There is little drop in quality from Max to High (for most tasks). And it cuts token usage by 2 a 2.5x. GLM 5.2, Max is really something you only need for complex tasks.
In essence, GLM 5.2 is Opus 4.8 its little brother, at a way, WAY cheaper price.
There has been really no training on Opus models going on, really, none i tell you! /sarcasm
distillation of thinking models is not particularly effective - both "Open"AI and Misanthropic don't show you the real chain of thought, only its severely downscaled version. both do everything in their power to combat such outrageous copyright infringement, so the bulk of unethically scrapped data the Chinese have is from several generations ago.
>such outrageous copyright infringement
Sarcasm, considering the source of their own training data?
Considering they called the company "Misanthropic", sarcasm is a safe bet.
IP for me, not thee.
Narrator: it was sarcasm, indeed.
FYI: model outputs are not protected by copyright.
Supposedly there are “jailbreaks” that expose considerably more of the thinking traces.
The companies that did copyright infringement and unethically scrapped data think that copyright infringement and unethically scrapping data is wrong and needs to be stopped.
Though only in particular situations, like when it’s done to them and not when they do it. Cause they have the power and are morally right and know better than you. And if you question this at all, well you’re a threat to American values and a supporter of the Chinese and leading to the break down of Democracy.
This isn’t a type of reasoning argument or manipulation tactic used by the rich throughout history to trick the naive and gullible masses or anything like that. Trust me, I’m rich and I’m morally right. /sarcasm
looking at the score this is rather a gemini 3.5 flash competitor, yes, for cheaper, but distance to opus and fable is as big as their price diff.
With such ridiculously long thinking traces I'm surprised max outperforms high. After all, performance falls off a hill after a certain amount of context, and long thinking traces can fill that up really quickly.
This is a problem I find with opus is will spend so long thinking then going “but wait what if”
To point where I stop it and simple tell it to “start writing code you can work it out as you go along”
Seems writers block also effects LLM
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00206
In this paper they nerf an LLMs ability to emit waffling thinking tokens like "wait", "but", "alternatively", and the models (they're old, small models in the paper) terminate reasoning faster and perform better. I bet Anthropic is tuning this on their backend.
This is super cool. Do you know if any of the inference backends (llama.cpp, vllm, etc) support this technique?
I usually have Claude build a plan first, then I put it into an XML file it updates with phases, usually we talk about some of those tasks, and then once its good and I like it, I have Claude implement the plan.
Another thing I tell Claude to do is to not guess, but look at documentation, it messes up a lot less, might use some tokens reading docs, but at least it has a higher success rate code wise.
XML??
Apparently because of how Claude is trained, even the system level prompts go through as XML, it works better with XML "prompting" so I figured I could have it write plans in XML. I need to update my ticketing tool to output XML maybe by default.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1psxuv7/anthropic...
Comments later in thread say markdown works just as fine and that it’s more important to organize your plan into sections.
Also just think about it, why would a model trained on the world’s corpus of text (that isnt formatted in xml) perform better with XML? It would be a better study if that post tested markdown, org, xml, json, etc. 10 times to see if their is a difference
Anthropic’s best practices still include the use of XML: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...
A year or so ago XML worked more reliably for long-lived prompt instructions. Now it is cargo culting.
XML stands for Xtra ML....
I'd like to switch to a sales career--can you give me any pointers?
Seriously. Whenever I read the thinking output I get mad and turn down effort to medium or low.
Just output the code and we’ll work through it!
I feel similarly about having codex review claude’s plans. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it catch a major issue. It just points out things that would have inevitably been addressed during implementation anyway.
A lot of times this is how humans work. Just start 'putting words on paper', 'think by doing', etc. sometimes it's more efficient to see why something won't work after writing a bit of it, and sometimes you get lucky and it works right off the bat
Qwen is notorious for this, too. It’ll sometimes spin in a long loop of “But wait…” paragraphs.
Fable was 20 times worse on that.
It's clear it was the vibe coding model, as like no other model before, fully turned you into his assistant instead of the other way around.
Could it be possible, these firms are optimizing for two things: a) Better performance. b) Gathering data from you to further improve performance later. I've also found the huge amount of planning rather than iteration frustrating. I've felt like I'm teaching a junior!
I think they simply optimize around E2E benchmarks, none of those benchmarks is designed as multi turn assistance to the user, but going from a prompt straight to the final solution.
more thinking == more tokens === more money LOLL
I think they are optimizing for one-shot performance because that will drive usage. They can’t afford to look bad in the benchmarks. And if that means consuming an order of magnitude more tokens, well, that’s good for business, too.
Os there a cost benchmark out there? I wonder how frontier models are doing over time for cost per problem solved.
I've been having success with Opus but you REALLY have to tame it. Long prompts that list what files to look at, relationships between entities, etc... I went from regularly hitting my daily limit to almost never hitting it. Oh, and also I was being lazy with small changes and stopping that helped a lot too. As you said, it gets in these loops where it's just churning and if you don't stop it it can go on for way too long.
Hopefully the recent work Moonshot did with Kimi K2.7 Code trickles in to the other open-model labs.
Per AA, while K2.7 Code is roughly on par w/ K2.6 in terms of intelligence, it uses half the output tokens to get there.
This is GLM 5.2 Max. GLM 5.2 High which use less than half[1] the tokens.
[1] https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.2
Yes, but the Artificial Analysis result is also from GLM 5.2 (max), not high.
They have this with a lot of models, measuring only the max setting, while the one you'd actually want to use for most tasks is much lower.
For the brief period with had Fable, I never had to use it above medium.
Low nailed the overwhelming majority of mundane tasks on it's own, medium was good for more complex stuff.
That's interesting. I gave nearly the same task to Gemma4 31b as a test yesterday. Write a symbolic math engine in Typescript that can perform evaluation and simple expression reductions over +-/*(). It performed the task correctly with minimal reasoning - much fewer reasoning tokens than output tokens.
Tbh, so what? I googled "symbolic math engine in Typescript that can perform evaluation and simple expression reductions over +-/*()" and got what looks to be viable answers without using any AI model at all. Reciting well established things from memory isn't terribly interesting. Show it a novel codebase and have it implement something within it.
TBH, while your point is a fair one, your attitude is off-putting and needlessly condescending.
So, a natural question would be why a model would ever get it wrong?
As per stats in other comments, it is frontier, not close to frontier.
> Of course if you convert those values to actual request cost, GLM 5.2 will probably beat GPT 5.5/Opus 4.8, but speed matters for a lot of people, I think.
GLM5.2 ends up being far more expensive than I thought it would be when I tried it on openrouter. I ground through $5 USD worth of tokens quite quickly.
And this was high, not max.
I agree. I've noticed that it is quite smart but it has a tendency to doubt itself and overthink. I monitor its internal dialogue and prod it when it does this. They need to optimize the chain of thought early stopping.
I have a script that ranks these based on codingindex from Artificial Analysis.
All it does is pull a json from their main table page and parses it with the fields I care about (coding).
There used to be a mailing list associated with it but eh ... there wasn't much interest. I use the script every day though.
Current partial output
To see everything, run it like so The repo: https://github.com/day50-dev/aa-eval-emailsome key takeaways:
* open models are on about a 4-7 month lag right now depending on how you want to measure it
* if this keeps up, you might see an open-weights model doing claude fable 5 level work before the new year.
if people sign up for the free mailing list (that just does this) I'll go and put it back on ... emails when new model evals drop - it was pretty useful.
Lol thank you for sorting.
Are the scores here normalized such that each point difference is equidistant?
My observations:
Surprised to see MiniMax M3 so low on that list, not really my experience, I found it smarter than Gemini for a lot of things, that's for sure.
Also surprised to see Gemini 3.1 ranked that high there. It remains IMHO blatantly incompetent for tool use even in their own harnesses, so I can only assume this benchmark isn't ranking workflow things very high. Gemini can write code just fine. It just can't work well as an agent.
GLM 5.2 and Qwen3.7 max were from my experience fairly expensive to use on a per token price and hard to argue in favour of when the SOTA coding plans have a fixed price that makes them potentially more cost effective. (Yes I know z.ai has a coding plan but I've heard reliability nightmare stories, and it's not very cheap)
DeepSeek is clearly the best value for $$. With the right harness and prompting.
Short comments...
- GPT 5.5 consistently the best, an opinion who gets me constant downvotes here by the Anthropic Marketeer strike force...
- China is going to eat the US lunch on AI
- What have European universities and companies been doing? Its like if, on a parallel past/future, Nikola Tesla and Edison would have created flying Cyberpunk machines, while Europeans researchers, would be getting together to request EU funds, for investigation on how to breed faster horses.
- If Zuckerberg could be fired, after spending a total of $235 billion on AI and having NOTHING to show for...should he be fired?
None of these models come from universities, European or otherwise.
Mistral is clearly currently not competing for Frontier Model. Whether this is due to a lack of VC Funds or a lack of technical ability or the former arising from the latter would be interesting to know.
The top models are from startups. Among the FAANG only Google managed to get a Frontier model, and they litterally invented the architecture and have more money than they can possibly spend to throw at the problem. Facebook shows that even ungodly amounts of money don't get you there though.
So why did no EU based Startups succeed while two US start ups succeeded? I agree that that's a very important question the EU should ask. The Internet revolution was driven by US companies, and now AI will be as well, with Chinese Open Weights mixed in. The EU consistently can not turn its considerable economic output into fast moving tech firms.
Mistral have moved to actually trying to make money, and been relatively successful; at least if we lived in a normal world.
They've got a heap of contractors working to help industry adopt LLMs. It is just classic consulting work, and they'd look like a really great company if we weren't comparing them to literal $2T+ companies losing money hand-over-fist...
Apertus was built by universities in Switzerland. Although not frontier it is fully open.
[1] https://apertvs.ai/pages/about/
I'm actually more curious about IBM. Their granite series appears to be nowhere close to competitive.
They had Watson, remember, it won on jeopardy like 15 years ago? They've been at this for a long time
Maybe it's good at something else?
IBM doesn't do technology they do contracts. Any "technology" is marketing stunts. They hire a bunch of "fellows" outside contractors to make a thing they can be first at or whatever, do the stunt, then get a bunch of 5-10 year contracts with customers off the stunt. They then fuck it up for that length of time but still get paid due to those contracts. After that space of time the folks theyve burned have moved on, rinse repeat. Pretty easy to look back at the timeline of "firsts" they have and see the pattern.
Yes, but the key point is that nobody got fired for buying it from IBM.
Don’t forget the marketing for the new $1B “initiative” (fill in: mobile, cloud, blockchain, AI,…)
Upon closer inspection the $1B is (a) over 10 years, (b) mostly internal cross-billing between departments.
Agree that IBM has no excuse. Specially for how long they have been trying to do AI. Although Watson was a completely different technology.
They had to start from scratch, but dont seem to have the management to be smart enough, to stop doing it in house. They could have just acquired a startup that could build a frontier model.
What is also very ironic since their whole bussiness for the last 15 years, has been buying companies a la CA Associates...
Their previous Watson branding and collapse of Watson expectations cost them one CEO, but the current CEO was part of the same team. They just dont learn....
I view Watson in the same light as Deep Blue, one-offs that brought more prestige and potential share value to IBM than necessarily "moving the needle" in the respective technology.
Granite is OK for speech to text (ASR)
To be honest, living in Switzerland and speaking with peers, we're just exhausted by the constant AI hype. For a lot of us, the fact that Europe isn't frantically trying to scrape the entire internet and every book in existence for the next massive model isn't a bad thing. The big players are doing their thing, like with the nuclear arms race. We regulate a lot, too much a lot of the time, but sometimes that trickles down to other places too. A lot was done right, imo.
ETH Zurich and EPFL universities recently put out an open model called Apertus (was on the HN front page a few months back), it's not a frontier model, but they built it properly regarding copyright and data transparency.
It might look a bit slow or old-fashioned, but focusing on doing things ethically and legally feels like a much better path than just joining the race to scrape everything.
Sir, I would suggest that if Europe fails to be economically competitive, the downstream implications on European society will produce much worse outcomes than (for instance) data transparency…
Doing things with ethical intentions does not necessarily produce outcomes that are beneficial for society at large.
I'm inclined to agree with you, but you could make the same argument for exploiting natural resources and the environment. I don't think it's being done right at the moment, and it does not seem to be benefiting people as much as certain companies.
give me a break.
Europoor is not doing anything. If your lack of AI progress is caused by regulations and respect for IP laws, how about EVs, robotics, drones, batteries, quantum computing. Also slowed down by your over regulations? LOL.
Europoor is called Europoor for a reason, your attitude here is the best explanation on how it happened.
You seem to be confusing Hacker News with 4chan.
They did muse spark ... it's not garbage.
Also what are they building it for? I'd think it's to serve ads better or something like that. Maybe Muse Spark fits facebook's needs perfectly...
Mo Bitar said something like "Meta's LLM is the one you use if you accidentially hit the wrong button in WhatsApp. Its user base is fat-finger phone users."
Understood - they're just doing other things. Maybe custom ad rewriting for a target audience or some kind of deep analytics insight into user behavior or translations that optimizes for maximizing purchasing habits over literary accuracy ... I'm just saying their incentives are elsewhere and maybe Muse is serving them well.
I mean that is the smart move here. Focus the model on optimizing the core business. For Meta, that's not coding tools.
> China is going to eat the US lunch on AI
They will forever have superior weights?
I would imagine it will be a fundamental breakthrough, not weights alone, that are going to usher in the next generation of AI. Perhaps China will in fact make that breakthrough. They certainly seem to have a lot of eyeballs in the field right now.
There has really been one break-through, the actual construction of giant LLMs from the available titanic corpus of text. Even that barely involved much conceptual breakthrough, a few things maybe e.g. transformer. Basically it was a question of the accessibility of a) giant internet corpus of actual people actually saying stuff and b) adequate computing power. The witty surface training, the scaffolding for a chatbot is what made a universal stir. With this, though, we are done with revolutionary breakthroughs. Training for coding involves actual alteration of weights - and as it improves the general utility of the corresponding models will fail. In the end it will be a domain of specialized models. The improvement of this aspect via RLVR etc is what caused a general mania in the programmer milieu.
There is a lot of money in pretending that we are seeing unending revolutions.
I think they are already massively winning on efficiency... which is about to matter a lot as the frontier models jack up their prices in order to some day see a profit (and no, Anthropic getting massively subsidized by Elon out of spite doesn't count for long term profits).
I also get the downvotes for the GPT thing, and agree with you about 5.5's quality, but TBH I don't think it's Anthropic marketing as just two other things:
1. SamA and his company has a well-deserved bad reputation and Anthropic got some early good PR for basically not being SamA.
2. Claude Code got early head space, Boris and crew basically "invented" this kind of agent, and so has first mover advantage despite its known reliability and cost issues.
3. Most people I talk to haven't even tried Codex for some reason
Also it's uncool to complain about downvotes.
I downvoted you for your complaining about downvotes fwiw.
And Zuck hasn't spent that much on AI yet. Half of that is projected spending for 2026.
As to whether it's all for nothing, Q1 2026 revenue was up 33% over Q1 last year, driven largely by...better AI-driven ad targeting. So the spending doesn't seem that crazy to me.
Well Europe is famously a laggard when it comes to new tech - in parts of Switzerland, two horses were required be mounted in front to carry cars up until 1925. UK required a person to walk in front of a car and wave a red flag.
"…Anthropic Marketeer strike force…"
Might also just be the result of "good will" (that the company has deftly fostered). Other companies might learn from Anthropic in that regard.
“Good will” is easier if OpenAI is your yardstick
As evil as Google is as a company these days [cough disclaimer, used to work here, so biased] I can't help but think that if Gemini didn't... suck, and if they had a coding model at the same quality as GPT 5.5 or Opus 4.8 they'd be completely cleaning up purely on the basis of relative reputations of the companies.
That Google is dropping the ball so badly, or just disinterested in the coding side of things... is either a sign of incompetence, or a lack of interest in losing money in that space. I wish I knew which.
you left some models out like DeepSeek and Kimi, for example.
It was a truncated output from the script to demonstrate what it does ...
If you really want to see all of them:
https://day50.dev/output.txt
Or run the script
Because it's not in the top 20 in their benchmark, it's at #23
Consider using decrementing score order (best on top)
then I'd have to scroll up over 500 lines after running it every time to see what I care about.
But if that's your thing, here you go: https://github.com/day50-dev/aa-eval-email/commit/1853be6461...
add an argument (any argument) and it will be sorted as your specified. It just works as a toggle flipping the order ... so literally any string will do.
The original link has been updated accordingly with the new code.
Have it print paginated or just top 10?
only the small ones:
or maybe just the qwen only the ones in the past 30 days I use it in pipes like this.Cool project! Side note: Kind of a bad practice imo to ask people to blindly execute bash from an unknown source.
Thanks for sharing. I'm curious: why didn't you sort with the score descending?
Because it's currently 511 lines. Why would I want to scroll up to see the stuff I care about? Don't you want the relevant stuff to be right there in front of you?
I do and that's why I pipe the output to `head -n 20` or use `LIMIT 20` in SQL.
That aside, this is a good script you're running. Thanks.
But maybe you decide you want to see more. It makes perfect sense for a cli tool to output the most interesting piece of info last: then you can decide on the fly whether you want to scroll up or not.
Not OP but if you run this from the CLI it does make the ordering make a little more sense
Because programmers can’t figure out how to have a CLI that prints in a normal order, with the newest stuff on top instead of on the bottom.
Setup a fresh new large monitor. Open CLI. Run command. Watch output at the bottom of your screen. Keep watching the bottom of your screen for the rest of the day.
Sure you can tile windows and it helps but come on. Just have the command/input section in the bottom and the “output” on top. Keep the command bit on the bottom.
Maybe your script could sort based on score.
Would be interesting to see where gpt 5.5 pro extended is.
Artificial Analysis coding benchmark shows GLM5.1 on high pretty close to GPT5.5 xhigh in cost to run, with GPT5.5 on medium significantly less expensive. Compared to GPT5.5 medium GLM5.1xhigh is twice the cost and half the intelligence. They don't have GLM5.2 on there yet, but that'd a big gap to bridge.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents?coding-ag...
I thought I was "holding it wrong" until DeepSWE came along -- personally it seems to match my own experiences pretty well. Really makes me wonder how legitimate some of the internet noise is about open models. There's surely some use cases for them, not everything needs the absolute frontier (GPT5.5 on low is awesome), but if you want to be near the frontier everyone needs to be honest about the fact that we're only talking about Opus, Fable, GPT5.5.
It got 46.2 on DeepSWE in Z.ai's own run[1]. That would put it between Opus 4.7 xhigh and Opus 4.8 medium.
[1] https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.2
with open models you can get a subscription with privacy, at the same cost as codex.
openai, google and anthropic subscriptions are not available with privacy.
looking at the link there it's interesting that going from cursor cli to codex cli take gpt 5.5 from 7th to 3rd. but they didn't do open model in codex.
so, hard to say it's for sure a model benchmark. maybe open models are just shit at swe agent harness...it's not the most parsimonious explanation though.
> with open models you can get a subscription with privacy
Unless you're running it locally, aren't you just trusting some other entity?
correct, you are trusting another entity.
however the legal terms are different, openai reads your data. they store it for 30 days, but of course once it hits the disk you can keep as long as you like in a civil case like nyt v openai.
the same for google and anthropic. so, it's not always nice if someone is paid to read your data for safety. people upload sensitive matters, personal videos and so on.
i wouldn't prioritise it myself but you can also know that the data will all come out in discovery if you are in a legal issue. maybe that's not important, but people thought it did matter to give some protections to patient records, legal advice and therapy. you upload that to gpt and it goes into discovery.
DeepSWE “feels” like the right benchmark in comparison to Artificial Analysis indices and other coding benchmarks. And by their metrics, GPT-5.5 is still king in token efficiency, speed, and overall intelligence per dollar.
https://deepswe.datacurve.ai/
Fable 5 is cool and all, but we have not yet seen GPT-5.6.
I gave GLM 5.2 a spin on openrouter yesterday and it was mostly fine but it racked up $5 in token use in 30 minutes of (relatively slow) work.
It's easily 4x the cost of DeepSeek V4 but I didn't actually feel the results were that much better. I had GPT 5.5 in Codex review it after it was done and there was plenty of slop to go around.
Having better luck with MiniMax M3, from a cost/benefit ratio.
I really like DeepSeek V4 Pro. It's pretty smart and I get so much usage out of it on a $20 Ollama cloud plan.
With a good harness, that's my favorite model for any personal project. I use Opus 4.8 at work because i don't have to pay for it and of course I love it, but DeepSeek is like 80% there for one tenth of the price.
Try MiMo-2.5, I'm having astonishing success with it in opencode for cents per day. Not even the pro model.
I've found MiMo-2.5 is fun for front-end design since you can use its multimodal capabilities to drop in whatever it produced and correct it for you.
> I had GPT 5.5 in Codex review it after it was done and there was plenty of slop to go around.
GPT can find fault in everything and anything including its own work.
AI review generally will find fault in anything. Any non-trivial code has multiple solutions with different tradeoffs. Any code can be over-engineered for theoretical edge cases and future use cases you don't need. No matter which solution you pick you can always at a minimum say that some alternative just looks and reads better.
Code is somewhat artistic. If you don't have well defined standards and priorities, the AI review cycle can spiral infinitely figuratively debating what makes art good, and your code will be no better for it.
This is correct, but I'd say there's something beyond that that's more specific about Codex + GPT models though. They've done some sort of training that makes it far more diligent about seeking out data races, unhandled errors / negative cases, and missing test coverage than the other models I've played with. It also seems more prone to testing its hypothesis.
This makes it slower to work with for prototyping, and it will, if not properly disciplined, litter your code with "legacy adapters" and "bridge code" and temporary incremental refactoring steps [arguably not terrible for work in real commercial software projects]. And it will create too many unit & integration tests, if you're not careful.
But it does, in my opinion, tend to produce more reliable software and I trust it far more than I did when I was working in Claude.
When I could afford it, I had both plans running, Claude to produce new features, and then Codex to brutally critique it battle test it, sharpen the edges, and produce better tests, and this flow went extremely well.
Now I just work with Codex and various open models.
That's what I love about it, and I wish I could find an open model that was as diligent.
Somehow it's just way more careful than the others, and also much better at empirical verification of its hypothesis, writing tests, etc. I am assuming a lot of RL done on that kind of flow, and on seeking out negative cases, failure points, race conditions.
Why aren't more people talking about this? It's literally Opus 4.7 quality stupid prices. I know providers who are offering this at unlimited tokens for $50 a month. Some are even offering API rates at 3x lower than the official ZAI api rates which are already like 10x cheaper than Opus. (Crof and Umans btw)
This is a huge blow to Anthropic/OpenAI/Google and a massive win for the rest of the world. The official API prices and speeds mean nothing for open source models.
> Some are even offering API rates at 3x lower than the official ZAI api rates
Looking at openrouter [1], some of the cheaper offerings are for quantized models. Not sure how much intelligence is lost in quantization. And they are not 3 times cheaper. Where did you find 3x lower prices for APIs? I am considering skipping open router and using them directly for that price.
edit:
I see, croft [2] 8bit for $0.50/$0.08/$2.20
[1]: https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.2
[2]: https://ai.nahcrof.com/pricing
IME, unquantised -> FP8 is pretty much lossless. What matters more is having an unquantized KV cache - using an FP8 KV cache can result in a significant drop in quality.
>unquantised -> FP8 is pretty much lossless
Claude Shannon is rolling in his grave.
Do infra providers reveal that level of implementation detail?
I've seen a few articles from providers talking about KV cache quantisation, but it's not something they explicitly point out like they do with weights.
So you could end up paying more for unquantised weights, only to get silently hit with a quantised KV cache...
Neuralwatt ... When you reverse calculate the actual energy usage / price on a token basis, the gap is large.
I do not have GLM 5.2 numbers because the whole default max setting is overkill. But GLM 5.1 numbers had it at 12x cheaper then API rates. And about 2.5x more tokens vs zai their own subscription service.
Yes, its FP8 but lets be honest, do we know for sure that even zai runs at FP16? I learned a long time ago with Claude and Codex how much cheating happens on model levels, even from the big boys.
Please correct me if you have contradicting data but: Neuralwatt's price per token vs price for energy comparison doesn't seem to take into account the cost savings from cache hits that other providers offer on pure token rates. The comparison seems to assume every input token is a cache miss.
On top of that, the cloud offering doesn't seem that well-run, they randomly blocked a colleague's API key for a couple days without any heads up, had a weird rate limiting bug and they have been deprecating models without redirects with very short notice, all while taking weeks to onboard new models. I assume some of these problems would be addressed if we had an SLA/enterprise contract.
It's a promising idea though. They offer a $5 trial credit (with an aggressive rate limit) though so no harm in trying it out.
Be careful about unofficial providers, a lot of them misconfigure models or stealth quantize them. For a while the difference between Kimi on the official API and most third party providers was 20-40%.
Kimi K2 had a vendor verifier: https://github.com/MoonshotAI/K2-Vendor-Verifier
(there's a table which shows comparison between vendors)
Also, it seems there's a general one as well (for all kimi models?): https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-Vendor-Verifier
OpenRouter should be penalising or banning for this.
This is my biggest complaint about OpenRouter and I'm a fan. Might be pretty tough at scale?
They have an "exacto" category with providers they supposedly verified
That’s only for tool use.
Would that align with their VC-backed incentives?
the 2 I mentioned both have a fairly large following, who run benchmarks and absolutely will spot issues.
To answer the question in your first sentence - because it's VERY computationally (ha) expensive as a human being to keep up with all the options. It's also very hard to figure out how to run a model like this. There's no installer. If you really really care, which 99% of people do not, you have to google a guide, and then find out it's out of date...
I've tried a number of these, and the learning curve is very steep compared to "install Claude Code and pay $100/mo". There is no way saving me $50/month matters compared to figuring that out.
But it just works with Claude Code? They have a guide on their website.
https://docs.z.ai/devpack/tool/claude
Here's my setup. I add this to my .bashrc
export ZAI_API_KEY="your_key_here"
alias claudez='ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN="$ZAI_API_KEY" ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="https://api.z.ai/api/anthropic" ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL="glm-5.2[1m]" ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL="glm-4.7" ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL="glm-4.7" claude'
Then I just run claudez
pro tip the same thing works with deepseek https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/anthropic_api
Even more pro tip: Claude Code can set this up for you haha
Sure, I'm not saying I, a software engineer, cannot do this. I'm saying it's significant onboarding friction.
Unless this were a massive differentiator, people aren't going to be "talking about it" the way GP suggests!
You're seriously suggesting that setting up opencode or tweaking your claude code config or etc is too much trouble to be worth saving $50 /mo? That's absurd. Doubly so when the audience in question is already using LLMs so ... just ask your existing LLM for help if it seems daunting.
I'm not just suggesting that, I'm trying to be crystal clear: it's a gap that probably cuts TAM by 95% or more. Most LLM users are not software engineers. Even those that are don't care enough to muck with their settings to try out a model. Keep in mind I'm not answering the question "Is this hard to install?" - I'm answering the question "Why aren't people talking about this?"
I would broadly agree with this (based on years of dealing directly with user-facing UX and setup steps). Small hurdles, even easy ones, create larger barriers to adoption then you’d think.
Doesn't pass the sniff test. Casuals messing around already go to far more trouble to set up openclaw or comfyui or what have you.
What percentage of "casuals"? ;)
"Casuals" just use the web interface from the provider, which Z.ai also has
Thats not absurd. Do you know what software engineers make? Do you know what a Starbucks coffee costs? 50 bucks is nothing for someone in that life.
> it's significant onboarding friction.
It's crazy that apparently writing software without knowing how to edit a single config file is normal now.
For me it's about tolerance. When I was 13, I could and would customize everything, so much that the computer repair shop told my father that their son "likely is a hacker or something".
At 40, I could easily configure claude code to use another model, even if there weren't any official guides with a bit of MITM fun, but I don't want to invest my attention / heavily use something that will most likely break in the near future.
It's crazy that apparently doing math without knowing how to do long division by hand is normal now.
Absolutely ludicrous comparison
The real question is: should the file be edited in emacs or vim?
Not really, you can literally have Claude set it up for you.
The friction is near 0 when you can ask another LLM to set it up for you.
Here are a few frictions I see that reduce reach, in order:
1) You haven't even heard of it.
2) You have to know to look for both GLM and Z.ai. These are usually in the same article when reporting about GLM is written, at least.
3) You have to understand there could be a benefit in trying it; you have to want to try it for some reason. Their own blog post puts it below Opus 4.8 in each of the three benchmarks they used.
4) You have to figure out the pricing, which isn't obviously in the blog post...
5) When I first went to Z.ai, I got an error popup (not logged in): "You do not have permission to access this resource. Please contact your administrator for assistance." I am using a personal computer...
6) When I typed something in the resultant field and pressed enter, I got "Clear Current Chat? To start a new chat, your current conversation will be discarded. Sign in to save chats"
I think today's article helped with 1 and 2, which helps their top of funnel. But they're fighting a big uphill battle.
install opencode, then either pay $10 for their plan, or add an openrouter api key.
> There's no installer.
There's ZCode (https://zcode.z.ai). Which is like the Codex App.
That's as "easy" as it is for non-devs that you're complaining about.
How does it compare to OpenCode? I already have too many LLM CLIs installed :(
I'm not complaining about anything. I'm answering a question.
I agree with this.
I'd pay for an out of the box solution. i.e. an Installer with updates
In my org everyone is extremely Claude-pilled to the point you’d think it’s the only LLM that exists, purely because it caters to non-engineers within enterprises.
> Why aren't more people talking about this?
Wasn't this released like 2 days ago? Everyone is still evaluating and playing around with it, things like the submission is just starting to come out. Give it some days at least before jumping to conclusions, ideally weeks.
I cancelled my claude sub after realizing I can burn 300m tokens a day of this quality, for $50 a month.
Which coding plan are you using? How are you finding it?
Isn't it closer to sonnet?
Definitely opus level for coding.
Oic I misremembered OAI scores, I thought Sonnet had 51
Do you have benchmarks or at least anecdotes to back that up? I'm not arguing with you; I would just love to see some proof that open models are getting as good as Anthropic's models.
I've been running some test prompts comparing frontier models for webdev, particularly pretty visualizations, physics / orbital simulations, etc.
Do note that GLM is not multi modal, which can be a deal breaker. And these open models are not good outside coding.
look at benchmarks, use the model yourself. Im usually first to call BS on every chinese model that says they are as good as Opus. this is finally the first one that actually is. It is a massive jump from every other previous chinese model.
"use the model yourself"
I wish I had the time to set it up and work on side projects but unfortunately life and work have been crazy (as I'm sure many here feel). That's why I asked for anecdotes about it.
I’m not that interested in models that I can’t run on my desktop for ~0€, which is my AI budget.
Electricity cost seems to be about $30/month for a 32B model on a GPU. It's probably better on Apple hardware.
https://github.com/QuantiusBenignus/Zshelf/discussions/2
Not accounting for hardware, of course :)
The price, processed tokens, and output can be anything, it just depends on what GPU it is.
Nvidia GPUs are much more efficient than Apple hardware for inference(and training).
My Mac Studio uses about 60–80 watts whenever I’m running a model (as measured by the system metrics), so it’s less than 2 kWh/day at full blast. Electricity is like 0.125 €/kWh, so that 24-hour period would be <0.25 €.
Not accounting hardware in my costs, since I didn’t buy my hardware for running models. Running models is just something it can do in addition to what I got it for.
Cool beans. You're not the target audience then.
Did I claim I was? I just said why I and people like me are not talking about it.
and he said its cool
> unlimited tokens for $50 a month
link?
> Why
imho everything but opus produces unusable code (fable was even better...), eg gpt5.5 seems to write the absolute worst code that still technically solves the problem; tbh I'd be totally willing to trade "raw intelligence" for "code taste"
more labs need to figure out whatever anthropic did to destroy everybody else on frontiercode bench
Opus has the nickname "Slopus" in a lot of circles for a reason. It can write nice code in isolation, but the way it organizes that code and its rigor in addressing edge cases/making sure things are robust leave a lot to be desired. Opus is particularly famous for having a real problem reinventing stuff that already existed in the codebase because it wanted to get to work before exploring sufficiently.
what you're describing doesn't sound like such a big deal -- it's (A) obvious during review, (B) easy to fix in a single prompt, (C) simple enough to fix manually, (D) can be mitigated with tokenmaxxing (agent review passes, prompting, subagents, etc)
regarding edge cases -- less is more in my experience, as removing is harder than adding
GLM 5.2 is the first model we've tested that is unambiguously on par with, or better than Opus 4.6 (although as usual, we have GLM 5.2 and most other Chinese models a bit below most other benchmarks with more vulnerable test methodologies).
Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings
I've been playing with this model a fair amount over the last 24 hours, and I can confirm it's quite capable, while being a little bit verbose (I've seen it reconsider things 3-4 times in thinking traces before deciding on a path forward), and not being quite as good as GPT5.5 at working through complex abstract requirements.
Honestly it's good enough that I feel comfortable recommending a Z.AI sub + a $20/mo OpenAI sub for all but the most AI pilled multi-orchestrators, or the die hard Claude fans. GLM writing + GPT reviewing/debugging feels pretty unlimited and minimally worse than just doing everything in GPT with the $200/mo plan.
> while being a little bit verbose
Discovered today that they set reasoning effort to max by default. So that’s probably why
> GLM writing
This is honestly what I care bout the most now, which is how well they can write. I think we have reached a point now, if you know how to program, you can provide enough information for the models to pretty much do what you need.
What they still struggle immensely with is the writing which has too many nuances but they are truly getting better.
This is my workflow. And then once a day I copy paste the code into the free Claude Sonnet so it comes out actually readable.
After having got a taste of Fable 5 for me Opus 4.8 doesn't cut it any more -- and I don't know how to put this, I don't know if it's just me, but it's rhetorical flourishes are starting to really grate on me, never mind that it is at times deliberately weasel-wordy and economical with the truth until pressed. Opus 4.8 is definitely a stronger coding agent than DeepSeek 4.0 or Kimi 2.7 succeeding where they flounder and fail but its way of expressing itself conversationally is making me reconsider my subscription …
You are not alone. How about GPT 5.5? Does it come close to Fable 5?
GPT 5.5 xhigh is smarter than Fable but Fable like Opus 4.8 as well is faster and seems more “agentic”. It’s easy to test this. Build a fairly complex software with Claude(opus or Fable).
Review the commits with both Claude and GPT 5.5 Xhigh. You can see that Fable is still sloppy(er) compared to GPT. You can test it the other way around as well(drive the dev with GPT and review with GPT and Claude). You get the same result Claude has an edge though and that’s on building more beautiful user interfaces.
5.5 is pretty good. It's no Fable though. It is definitely better than opus tho.
Knowing very little about how to run these, how close are we to medium or larger businesses starting to buy hardware to run models like this to keep the models local?
It’s expensive, and not as capable as the frontier models, but would have some pretty big benefits around privacy and agency.
I know of multiple businesses in Europe that have been doing that for a while with 70B models, and are upgrading hardware to run the new crop of 700B-1T models (really started around Kimi K2, but buying and hosting that kind of hardware takes time)
Not everyone is willing (or even legally able) to send their trade secrets to OpenAI or Anthropic
While certainly there are such cases with trade secrets, it's worth noting that even large banks typically have a provider like Azure or AWS onboarded.
There they can deploy these models while using the existing legal frameworks.
What kind of hardware/price does it take to run those?
Nvidia will sell you an entire server rack ready for inference. Or maybe you can roll out your own Blackwell based system.
We’re approaching a world where running a primer frontier model is possible on a workstation, probably will have something under $30k that looks like a desktop for Nvidia’s next generation. It sounds expensive, until you look at your Anthropic bill.
It’s similar unit economics as could computing for the open models. You can save a ton on the expenses by buying the hardware, but it requires a lot of in-house expertise, and you get the most value if you keep the system operating around the clock. The big kink is open models are usually 2 quarters behind frontier, and your competitors are probably trying to get access to mythos.
"approaching" is doing some work there. $30K today will get you 90-144GB usable VRAM with solid system RAM and disk and CPU. A single B200 chip at 180GB is $40K. Unfortunately that is nowhere close to being able to run a 750B param model. For something like that, we're getting closer to 1TB VRAM (8+ H200/B200), and then 1M context KV cache is many more GBs on top of that.
That's a $500K-$1M+ rig as of now. That's a lot of $200 subscriptions to break even, but reasonable if you are paying Anthropic $25/M tokens. Then of course there's the power, cooling, and maintenance to consider...
But yeah, I can see if the prices come down 10x in a few years, or crater after the bubble, $30-40k might get you a decent machine.
> Unfortunately that is nowhere close to being able to run a 750B param model. For something like that, we're getting closer to 1TB VRAM
You don't have to run a model from VRAM, or even from a sizeable amount of RAM. These choices only ever make sense when serving the model at scale, to hundreds of simultaneous users or more.
For workstation inference a unified memory architecture would be a good cost/performance balance, while keeping COGs reasonable.
512GB unified memory macs are available, with the ram upgrade costing a few grand.
For an 8-bit quant (what people call "near lossless") you are looking at something like 4xMI350X, which comes out to about $150k after adding the rest of the server. More if you go with Nvidia instead of AMD. More if you want more than maybe 8x concurrency
But prices are changing rapidly, and not for the better
This is not a new situation. This was happening also when good vision models like alexa net were coming through, especially for OCR. Companies had choice between cloud or self hosting with GPUs. But turns out, problem is usage patterns.
Your usage will peak during certain timezone work hours(even if you are a huge multinational company most of your engineers/users tend to be from only a few locations), so then you have a bunch of gpus doing nothing the rest of the day. especially with latency sensitive stuff, this is a decades old tradeoff problem, its not unique to llms
It’s a ~750B model so still a hell of a lot of vram
Would need to be a pretty determined medium biz
So far there seems to be one major use-case for complete privacy, and that is legal work. You don't need top of the line models to search vast amounts of text in discovery and it needs to be completely confidential. There's quite a few lawyers over on r/localllama showing off their multi-GPU builds. Coincidentally they also have the vast funding required for it.
Unless you have genuine national security concerns, you’d be better off just negotiating a commercial agreement with privacy protections with a couple of existing vendors.
I think that's true until it isn't, which may end up being the problem. Fable/Mythos doesn't fall under the ZDR agreements with Anthropic. And I'm curious if others will follow suit.
if you can afford the investment you get stable low costs for years with better security (at least if your cyber team is good). its even better in regulated industries where some vendors might add a premium for hipaa/soc/pci dss compliance to the point its a lot cheaper to self host. for a smaller business its not worth it and you should just use a hosted open model.
> to the point its a lot cheaper to self host
I'm pretty skeptical, especially given typical utilization patterns. Do you have numbers, or this is just vibes?
> how close are we to medium or larger businesses starting to buy hardware to run models like this to keep the models local?
Years.
Even Microsoft said they don't have enough for Github and need to call Amazon.
Getting a few even at decent prices is hard. Unless the shortages goes down...
I was surprised that GLM 5.1/5.2 are not vision models - they are text input only.
That's actually pretty uncommon these days. All of the OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini models accept images, and so do the other leading open weight families - Gemma 4, Qwen 3.6, Kimi 2.x.
In GLM's case image input would be useful because it's a model that scores very highly for tasks like web design, but without image input it can't take a screenshot and output HTML+CSS.
Don't get me wrong, GLM is a phenomenal model, but the image thing is a bit of a gap.
Configure a subagent in your coding harness to spin up a new sub-session with any vision model for those tasks and feed the result back to the main model. No need for "one model that does everything"
Are you suggesting it should summarize the image in text or generate it in HTML or something else?
I don't see this being such a big gap. There are some use-cases for sure but apart from UX/UI work it is not really needed. Besides, none of the frontier models can replicate actual images - the can approximate at least in my own experience.
One of my tests for a new model is dumping in a screenshot of a web page and seeing if it can recreate it from scratch in HTML and CSS.
Even the local models I run on my Mac are getting surprisingly good at that now.
Using llms to generate docx. Being able to rasterize and review is an important part of the process.
I had the same reaction with Deepseek V4 ! It would be more useful as a vision model
> On the Intelligence vs. Cost per Task Pareto Frontier: GLM-5.2 is on the Pareto frontier of the Intelligence vs Cost per Task chart, with the lowest cost per task among models at its intelligence level. GLM-5.2 costs ~$0.46 per task, compared to GLM-5.1 ($0.25), Kimi K2.6 ($0.31), MiniMax-M3 ($0.18) and DeepSeek V4 Pro (max, $0.05)
am i missing something?
I think they’ve just picked poor peer examples. Instead of choosing other models near 5.2 on the intelligence scale, they’ve picked some open models from further down the scale.
Some models are heavily subsidized. Total params & active params are better measurement of inference cost.
No models are subsidised -- there are lots of third party hosting services that will still run at breakeven/profit. (except Deepseek after discount)
> No models are subsidised
We have no proof in either direction, it's not like we had access to their financial numbers in details.
And the pricing itself muddies the water, as input tokens that are already in the KV cache are practically free for the provider, whereas other tokens are expensive. So they could still make money overall thanks to people having multi-turn conversation (and as such, paying multiple times for the same token), but lose money on actual compute done.
> there are lots of third party hosting services that will still run at breakeven/profit.
How can you be sure that they are making profit directly from token price, and are not billing at marginal cost (i.e. electricity price, without counting the cost of the GPUs) and aiming to make a profit later on from the valuable training data that they are collecting in the process?
> as input tokens that are already in the KV cache are practically free for the provider,
not at today's RAM prices.
> How can you be sure
You are free to believe that they are doing all this. Or you can simply believe the intuition that models are getting cheaper by the day. I can run Gemma 4 31B from my laptop today.
> Or you can simply believe the intuition
Sure, you can believe you intuition as much as you want, but telling strangers over the internet that they are wrong because “I trust my intuition” is… awkward.
At some point it does come to intuition. Even if the companies IPO and share their financials, you can always argue that they might be lying.
Again, there's a difference between relying on intuition in your life (which we all do, lacking perfect information that would allow us to avoid relying on it), and telling someone they are wrong because your intuition says so.
I'm curious what harness everyone is using for these? I want to start to test some of these open models but don't know what tools people use to get these working "agenticaly"
It's probably a good model but they used GLM 5.1 to code their infra.
I signed up to their max plan yesterday, did some light coding work, and i'm at 180M tokens used and 40% weekly quota gone.
Even when tokenmaxxing on the Claude Max or GPT $200 plan, i couldn't get more than 20% quota gone per day.
It's also third best overall on "AA-Omniscience Non-Hallucination Rate", far higher than DeepSeek, GPT 5.5 or Fable.
That's the one benchmark that allows LLMs to answer "I don't know" and punishes them for trying to bullshit their way through the questions
In my tests[0] GLM-5.2 is not much better than GLM-5, and overall DeepSeek V4 Flash seems to be the better/more cost-effective choice:
[0]: https://aibenchy.com/compare/deepseek-deepseek-v4-flash-high...
I think the problem is, as can also be seen on other benchmarks, is that most models nowadays are focused more and more purely on tool calling and coding.
This means, that models are losing more and more general and domain-specific knowledge.
Look at those graphs on ARtificialAnalysis, GLM-5.1 still performs similarly or better:
AA-Omnisicence Accuracy: https://i.snipboard.io/5DYmpx.jpg
IFBench: https://i.snipboard.io/74kg0R.jpg
I still feel like models are not getting any smarter for a few months already, they just changed their training to be focused more on some areas than others, so shifting the intelligence from one place to another, not necessarily increasing the overall intelligence or "AGI" score.
man, i love dsv4-flash but i found its weaknesses in complex projects with multiple moving parts. tried kimi 2.6 and it understood and could work on the task. bigger is better..
According to many benchmarks this model is straight up frontier level and Zai seriously cooked. Some of these numbers are incredible.
Excited to see if this turns out to be a Open Weight Opus 4.5 or better.
The only benchmarks that matters is your actual task.
I've had models that benched poorly but performed great. And I constantly see models at near the top of AA, which are terrible.
There doesn't necessarily seem to be a lot of overlap between benchmarks and real world usage. (Let alone common sense!)
As far as they go, though, these harder benchmarks match my experience more closely:
https://deepswe.datacurve.ai/
and https://cognition.ai/blog/frontier-code
Where we see "top" models drop way down in score when given longer tasks.
That being said, I've had a reasonably pleasant time with GLM-5.2 so far. (And have had an OK time with DeepSeek as well.)
By the time I'm done testing all the Chinese models, they'll be obsolete :)
According to reports in this thread it is somewhere between Opus 4.7 and 4.8. This is effectively frontier.
This open source model is quite near SOTA with only 700B/40B MoE. Truly efficient.
GLM 5.2 feels like Opus 4.6 level. I actually think 4.6 and GLM work better in practice than opus 4.7 or 4.8 as I find both of those more erratic and seem to randomly have a super dumb turn. That random bad turn I see doesn't seem to be hitting the benchmark scores but they make 4.7 and 4.8 very hard to use for me. GLM is more stable like opus 4.6
So this basically means we will have a near opus level model able to be run locally in the next couple of months right?
QWEN 3.6 27b is already pretty good, but it should be possible to get a better option now that runs in the same hardware, right?
Which Opus?
GLM-5.2 is already close to Opus-4.7 level:
https://aibenchy.com/compare/anthropic-claude-opus-4-7-mediu...
Oh, or you meant a smaller model than GLM-5.2 with similar capabilities?
Probably not. Qwen3.(5|6)-27B seems like an "accidental freak". I'm not even sure they know what they did to create that. A decent amount of the team members left after that, so unfortunately, we might not be seeing another small model that packs such a punch for a while. Hopefully the team is studying their entire training recipe for that and is able to replicate. If they are, then a 50-70B dense model might give us such capabilities...
Yep! I'm running things locally on a RTX5080 + RTX1060 + 64GB DDR5 ram, and would love to get a more capable model if possible!
QWEN3.6 27b is pretty good, but i can still notice some spots where it's not as good as the frontier models.
Why wait for the next few months? There are plenty of better models that you can run today locally. Qwen3.5-397B beats Qwen3.6-27B. MiniMax2.7 is a longrun horizon monster. (I haven't given 3 much of a try yet). KimiK2.6/2.7, MiMoV2.5/MiMoV2.5-Pro and GLM5.1 will wreck Qwen3.6-27B any day on any task.
Just ran and scored 63 3d model generations (via code) across high and no reasoning. 3D Modeling benchmark quickly shows spatial, logic and code performance of the model so I think it's a very good indicator of the quality.
Here are the results compared to Gemini 3.5 Flash:
Although it is cheaper, it is significantly slower, and results are worse overall. Surprisingly - high reasoning produces less code errors than gemini 3.5 flash, but when I actually look at the models they are worse.Edit: I recently ran evals with Kimi 2.7 and MiniMax-M3 and this is clearly open source SOTA model, by far.
Very interested in this! Can you share more about the modelling method (eg, three js?), the task list, and outputs here?
I think there's probably some good juice to squeeze in terms of spacial awareness by doing a benchmark something like
- give 3d modelling task
- render and snapshot from a variety of angles
- feed to third-party vision model for a "what is this" type query
- grade on end-to-end accuracy
Bonus points for asking the vision model something like "how beautiful is this 1-10".
I don't have the eval results live yet, so I cannot share them yet.
I was benchmarking using a soon to be released new version of my AI CAD modeling software[0]. It's basically an agent that has access to tools that can execute build123d scripts, get sculpted models, blender to combine sculpts + parametric models, tools to inspect the model (visually and with code), search datasheets, ...
I tried what you recommend a while ago (asking an AI to evaluate using different angles) and the AI evaluations were extremely bad - barely any correlation to what I scored. Things have gotten better, but I don't trust it enough yet.
Here is how I score adherence (and how AI did as well, but I tried methods where it would just give back a boolean "pass" or not):
Here is the scenario list (prompts are much more detailed): [0]: https://grandpacad.comVery cool project. Thanks for sharing!
Would you be able to run it against Gemini Flash (not Lite) 3.0, high thinking?
Absolutely. Running it now, will update this comment in about 30 mins.
Edit: Surprisingly very good results with 3.0 flash with high thinking.
Cost: $0.06
Duration: 3.22 min
Code Errors: 1.3 per attempts (meaning on average it had to retry 1.3 times)
Adherence was on par with 3.5 flash Low thinking
Thanks! I’ve still been using 3.0 a lot, the price-to-performance ratio absolutely kills compared to Google’s other and newer offerings.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but neither DeepSeek nor GLM have image input modality. This makes them less useful when looking at UIs, photos, screenshots, etc. doesn't it? Or do they have alternate ways of doing so?
DeepSeekv4+ will have image capability, they said so in their paper. GLM whenever they decide to. Both companies have they tech and for whatever reason haven't decide to prioritize it. Both of their OCR are SOTA among all OCR models closed or open. GLM demonstrated they know how to do this, with GLM-4.6V.
Yes, you are right (as far as I'm aware). For things where you need the LLM to look at screenshots, photos or other images you can use Kimi-K2.6/K2.7 - comparable pricing, somewhat comparable performance and quality. You can even probably combine two models (e.g Kimi and GLM) in one agent, using Kimi for multimodal inputs and GLM for everything else, although 1) I'm not sure if this will not cause some kind of context poisoning with low-quality patterns for better performing model (e.g. in some cases Kimi may be worse than GLM, but GLM, when following up, may adopt the same reasoning patterns as Kimi, undermining it's own performance), and 2) I'm not quite sure if it's possible with the tools currently available (I'm not really into agentic or chatbots stuff to be honest).
They do not and it sucks for certain tasks.
It also means that if they actually trained with vision, they'd be on par with Anthropic models as vision seems to improve model performance across the board even for non-vision tasks.
Many other open source models have vision but they don't compare to GLM in terms of coding quality. So I don't think it's because of vision that the frontier models are better, it's more that they are probably just much bigger models.
it helps giving them a cli vision tool (curl to openrouter vision model for example)
That's right, but there are other recent open weights and relatively big LLMs that are multimodal, e.g. MiniMax-M3.
With open weights LLMs, it is affordable to use many different models, each for whatever it is better.
Moreover, for analyzing "UIs, photos, screenshots, etc." there are small models that can be run locally on smartphones or laptops, e.g. IBM granite-vision-4.1-4B, certain Google Gemma 4 variants and certain Qwen variants, whose output you can use as input for a big LLM, in order to accomplish some more complex task.
Configure a subagent in your coding harness for vision, add a prompt about the vision use, configure a vision model for it, modify your main agent's prompt to use the vision subagent for vision tasks. Now your non-vision model has vision support.
They have a separate VL model but never tried it
The problem with these benchmarks is that the Chinese models tend to be incredible on paper, and absolutely terrible in practice :/
This was a problem with older Qwen/MiMo/Kimi models mostly. GLM has always been on the more robust side, and newer iterations from all those labs have improved as well. The only lab I've seen regressing this way is DeepSeek, 3.2 was fairly robust but 4.0 feels more benchmaxxed.
I have used GLM since version 4.8 I think and do enjoy using them. More then other models like Kimi or Deepseek. Though only tested them on smaller private projects.
> I have used GLM since version 4.8 I think
You probably refer to GLM-4.7
I beg to differ. I replaced a $40/mo GitHub Copilot subscription where I used Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.5 with a $10/mo opencode Go plan where I use mostly DeepSeek V4 Flash and testing MiMo 2.5.
I work on mid-sized projects currently (200k to 1kk lines of code).
> 1kk lines of code
Isn't that a million?
Yep. I consider up to a million lines of code as mid-sized.
When I worked in banking, the codebases were often larger than a million.
You are obviously lying because it shows you have no experience with. GLM since 4.5 have been crushing it. all their models since then haven't skipped a beat. 4.5/4.5-air, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8, 5, 5.1. That aside, MiMoV2.5, MiniMax from 2.0, DeepSeek from V3, Kimi since V2, Qwen since 3, Hy3 have all been amazing models. All from China, we need to get over it. China is not losing yet as far as the AI race is concerned.
Is there a GLM-4.8 model?
For anyone who's interested, I've put together a simple site for sharing ratings/opinions on models at a task-specific granularity. https://model.reviews/
The idea is that benchmark score comparisons are useful for a large cross-product comparison across models + their settings, but less useful if you're looking for the best model for <your-specific-task>. So I thought having a place to review and comment could be beneficial to people.
I'm not sure how best to get the corpus bootstrapped (i.e. people will likely only visit/post on the site if there's already activity), so posting it here for anyone who'd like to contribute.
I like their models, super cheap - I'm a Lite plan subscriber, and subjective performance seems to be same as lower Anthropic models, useful for lots of grunt work. The problem is that Ziphu really __really__ struggle with capacity - everyone is complaining of timeouts or very slow speeds. I can't get direct access to the model though I see it is in OpenRouter so I may play. But the capacity issues means DeepSeek is my main provider these days
I am helpful.
DeepSeek V4 has been quite amazing in our workloads and it operates at a fraction of the cost. I have not tried GLM 5.2 but it seems that it hits a sweet spot.
Your system prompt is showing.
Maybe he meant "hopeful"...
I've made a comment before that 5.1 will sometimes get stuck looping over a simple decision or statement. It will basically contradict and then not realize that one option is the definite option. Sometimes it's two statements that aren't even exclusive. Nonetheless, a lot of tokens that get wasted from this.
I haven't extensively used 5.2 yet, but it seems a lot better.
FYI.. This is coming with 3mil GLM 5.2 tokens right now. (Needs login. Google SSO fine) https://zcode.z.ai/en
Where can I read more about the coming 3mil GLM 5.2?
Hmmm... GLM insists it's Gemini.
https://github.com/zai-org/GLM-5/issues/79
It's a surprisingly common misconception that models contain any metadata at all about themselves in their weights. If you ask them, "What model are you?" they either retrieve the answer from the system prompt, or they hallucinate an answer. Same goes for questions about knowledge cut-off, how many parameters they have, the source of their training data, etc.
Huh. That kinda makes sense. So you think it's hallucinating it's model name?
Then why does it score better than any Gemini model?
As I understand, some people tend to "distill" LLM models. Google hasn't released a new Pro version in a while. I'm not an expert in LLMs.
These open source models need better multi-turn capabilities. They are always lacklustre in "agent mode". Whether it's just less RL, whatever, it's a worse "product". Whereas it feels like the frontier labs have been all-in on "agentic" multi-turn reasoning for a long time now.
Fun fact: Zhipu aka Z.ai, Knowledge Atlas etc., the company that made GLM, is listed on Hong Kong stock exchange, is up over 10x since the IPO at the beginning of this year.
I have a question, as it happens: Do you think the benchmarks and models were trained on benchmark datasets to skew the results, even though in real-world applications we realize they're not that great?
Recent incident with the Rio 3.5 model clearly shows that many coding models are specifically trained/fine tuned for the benchmarks.
what is that moodboard and chart of hypertension in the middle of the article that isn't explained?
This is a great step up in open models however the pricing to support z.ai is not far cheaper than Claude / OpenAI subscription
why do not all open source LLM's have open weights like this model?
"open source" means that the code itself (for LLMs - this is training code) is available to the general public. "open weights" means that the weights (trained over time) are available publicly, rather than locked behind a paywalled chat. I do not know of an open source LLM that is not also open weights (unless they never bothered training it). Models like Claude and Gemini are neither open source, nor are they open weights.
This is really held back by one bench (omniscience accuracy) where it's really very far behind otherwise i think it's got at least a couple of points higher.
DeepSeek v4 pro is still 10x cheaper than GLM-5.2 and the quality is still enough for 95% of coding tasks.
....so use DeepSeek v4 Pro for 95% of your coding tasks, and GLM 5.2 for the other 5%? You don't need to stick to one model.
People always say stuff like this, but it is misleading. The reason it's misleading is because that remaining 5% makes a huge difference, and is where most of the value of using AI agents lies.
I'm not interested in using AI to write code that would have taken me 5-10 minutes to write myself. I use AI to debug complex bugs and develop large features that span multiple domains - stuff that normally takes hours, if not days/weeks. A model that is "enough for 95%" does not cut it for that, because the failures compound during long-horizon tasks and the thing becomes a mess.
I get what you mean. But for many people, AI coding is not about solving complex problems. No, they do it mostly themselves. AI coding for many is a productivity tool, where it helps you with mundane, but laborious tasks.
In my setup, I use a daily workhorse for such things. They should be fast, cheap and reasonably working well. I don’t expect it to be smart, but need it to follow instructions perfectly and handle tool calling well.
For architectural work or debugging help, I use the top models instead.
That works reasonably well for me with a low cost.
It's a real step forward, getting closer to SOTA. It seems to be very epistemically cautious in its reasoning. I hope Deepseek and the other open-weights labs stay in the game and catch up too.
Open-weight models are winning. The gap with closed models is now measured in months, not years.
It’s pretty good. More talkative than 5.1. Reminds me of deepseek 4
Their servers are melting though - getting more timeouts etc
> GLM-5.2 sits off the most attractive quadrant on the Intelligence vs Output Tokens chart.
That is unfortunate...
Cerebras really needs to have this on their API list (if they even still exist).
they went public a few weeks ago
That's cool and all, but they are still on GLM 4.7
Which is fine for their target market. Their latest model is Kimi K2.6, available to enterprise customers. But older models become more powerful when you have time to do more reasoning. Also many applications don't need advanced models. Cerebras is making bank from all the other use cases that SOTA providers left on the table by focusing on 0-shot intelligence over speed
It is a very useful model
1m context btw.
And apparently, actual support for 1M context window, not just theoretical.
Sure, but whatever you do, don't buy their (Z.ai) lite plan.
I feel like i threw 15 dollars in the sea. I'm getting rate limited after 3-4 prompts. You get way less value than just paying 25 dollars for Claude or OpenAI models.
Did you consider their peak hours and model usage multiplier? Read the green box https://docs.z.ai/devpack/overview#usage-instruction
I had the Lite plan, I NEVER maxed out the quota because I considered these things. If I, for example, switched over to GLM-5-Turbo, then I could've easily burned through quota.
I just read it and honestly it left an even worse taste in my mouth.
>GLM-5.2 and GLM-5-Turbo are advanced models designed to rival Claude Opus model. Its usage will be deducted at 3 × during peak hours and 2 × during off-peak hours.
Claude certainly does not punish me for using their best models. Why should this "up and coming" company do it?
I thought the up and coming ai companies was supposed to have some kind of leverage in terms of price/performance (see deepseeks insanely cheap V4 flash and pro).
With a claude code plan, can you generate as many tokens with Opus as you can with Haiku before filling your 5 hour window? The same is going on here.
How are you using it? I have the lite plan and I've only ever maxed my weekly usage a few hours before reset. I will concede that I'm not a super heavy LLM user but it's been really good for me.
My workflow is usually:
- read file. I want to achieve X, how do? Do not implement anything.
- I would do a, b and c
- sketch a brief implementation of your suggestion
- <code> (not writing files yet)
- instead of your approach x, wouldn't it make sense to instead do z? What would that look like?
- <code>
- nice, implement this
- starts writing files, run tests, etc.
Try pointing it to a small codebase, or even ask it to conjure information found online.
You'll see that it quickly gives up. Thing is, they seem to count cached hits as if they were the non-cached tokens.
I wont be subscribing again thats for sure. I am not paying iPhone money for a Xiaomi.
That's what I've been doing. I use crush normally. While the codebase are by no means huge, they're not tiny either.
Are you using it in an agentic workflow? Just reading the codebase will consume a lot of cached tokens, but seemingly, z.ai counts these as normal input tokens the way they're rate limiting.
I'm not entirely sure what an agentic workflow could mean today but I think so. I use a coding agent (crush), prompt it to brainstorm an implementation with me (or sometimes I know exactly how I want to implement it but ask it to challenge it), correct any wrong assumptions or request the implementation to look differently than suggested if I don't like it. Then finally when I'm positive I've cleared the most important assumptions I ask it to actually write and edit files and run tests and such (this just ends up being a "implement this").
With any model I've tried I've found it to be a huge pain to have it fix things where it made a wrong assumption without the code becoming a mess and burning a lot of tokens. I'm aware that not everyone works like this but I'm still very opinionated on what the end result should look like so I can still work on it without an LLM.
I asked z.ai what z.ai is, and it said "It seems you might be referring to xAI, as "z.ai" isn't a widely known or major AI company or platform at this time."
Regrettably I haven’t tried 5.2 yet but 5.1 I did not see as anything special. In practice I found it to be ~70% as good as Claude sonnet.
looks like I need a GB300 workstation
I have been trying out GLM 5.2 and I am really impressed by it for the most part.
To all people on Hackernews, I am curious as to what agent harness are you using it with.
Previously I was using opencode and then I switched to using Opencode + obra/superpowers and creating custom skill.md themselves for it. I found things to take more time and intervene more but the result of it has been that I have found it to work better.
Now I have also started using oh-my-pi as well and I found it to be faster compared to Opencode.
I am unsure how much of there is a difference to it and how much of things are placebo but what is your opinion regarding the best Agent harness for GLM 5.2?
I just used CC with GLM, I was satisfied.
Ok, it is nice to see another great open source model. Not sure what to think of all these benchmarks but GLM was already quite strong before so an update is very welcome.
I tried it today through Openrouter and the API is atrocious. I got multiple rate limit and random errors every turn.
Somebody wrote [1]; "I am never touching Minimax or GLM again. Their APIs had constant outages and I had to restart my runs multiple times — after burning money on the runs that failed midway." and I 100% agree.
The model might be good, but if the API is so bad, it's effectively useless.
[1]: https://kasra.blog/blog/i-spent-1500-seeing-if-llms-could-ha...
The entire point of this post is that it's open weights, you can run it yourself and don't have to deal with the API issues. You really do have that choice.
You could subscribe to Anthropic/OpenAI for the rest of your life for the cost it would take to host GLM5.2 locally - you need 1.5TB of VRAM just for the weights
You don't need that much VRAM unless you're targeting a high-performance deployment that's intended to scale far beyond local use. For a lower-throughput case, you can keep the model weights on SSD at very low cost and stream them in for inference. This could actually scale reasonably well if you have something as simple as a previous-gen HEDT with a decent amount of PCIe lanes to host fast storage from.
That’s what happens when you offer something decent at a fraction of the price of opus - more demand than you can serve
Give it a few days and additional provider will be up and available on OpenRouter. Then the game of figuring out who’s not nuking the weights and neutering the quantization begins.
I indeed got a few timeouts yesterday using the official API, I imagine for the coding plan users it'll be even worse.