GLM-5.3 is now open-weight

634 points215 comments14 hours ago
revolvingthrow

GLM 5.3 is probably the sweet spot open weights model if you want to go beyond deepseek flash or the new glm flash. I used it with pi and had a fairly good time, especially since it’s less touchy about cyber and whatnot than the US guys. It’s slightly behind Kimi in ability but it’s a lot easier to run it, I’d expect prices (and speed!) from third parties to be noticeably better.

Assuming you’re willing to drop a fat stack of cash on the upcoming Mac m5 ultra with 512 gb unified memory, you can even run it locally, quantized to 4 bit. Whether it’s even slightly reasonable, well, my wife would probably skin me alive but maybe yours is more understanding.

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nkmnz

I'd like to ask Sam Altman if he still thinks that it's too dangerous to publish GPT-3. I mean, no one would use it, but what is his reasoning for not publishing it now, in 2026?

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mmastrac

I previously posted that DS4Flash was _good_ but not _great_ on two DGX Sparks, but I have to say that GLM-5.3 is pretty amazing. It's been able to tackle all the random hard problems I've thrown at it and it has the intuition that DS4Flash seems to lack.

We're nowhere near a Fable-class model IMO, but things are going to get interesting in this next year.

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armcat

What's very promising here is the number of tokens-vs-accuracy ratio. I am assuming their "output tokens" means tokens generated as part of thinking and any tool calls (what are referred to as "input tokens" from billing PoV by service providers). The Chinese models like Qwen3.8 and GLM 5.2 are insanely overthinking in our workloads (which are highly complex data analysis tasks). It's a factor of 3-4x over Opus and GPT models. Even with cheaper prices per 1M tokens, the cost ends up being higher, in some cases 2x. So this is very promising from GLM 5.3. Looking forward to trying it.

scosman

I've been using it more and more. Feels like Opus 4.8, in the best possible way.

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redox99

I find GLM 5.3 Flash more interesting than 5.3. The fact 5.3 does not have vision is kind of a deal breaker. Also 5.3 Flash seems to be better at making pretty UIs.

fra

h/t to DeepInfra for being the first 3rd party provider for it on OpenRouter (https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.3?endpoint=b711bea7-3994-49...).

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jamesforestwest

Interesting model. It's nice to see open-weight models catching up with the top proprietary ones. The coding benchmark results are pretty impressive. Overall, it's great to see progress moving forward. Curious to see how it performs in real-world usage.

kixiQu

Does this mean it'll be on Bedrock soon? I hear great things about this model but I want AWS data handling practices...

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pal9000i

how feasible is it build a SOTA specialized model for some use case e.g. deal sourcing by using this as pre-trained model or a LORA or similar pattern on top? Gonna shoot my shot at a billion dollar business

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barrenko

A stake through Amodei's heart.

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onesandofgrain

Man, imagine if we didn't have China.

hkalbasi

Is it possible to fine tune this model and unlock / extend its cybersecurity capabilities? I'm scared that maybe we are not ready for an open-weight model with high cybersecurity skills.

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ylliu

These open weight models are catching up pretty quickly recent, I guess that's a nice thing for us

anam0012

Been using it, works wonders. I think generally the models are good enough now that with enough eval harness we can do a lot of automations.

m00dy

GLM-5.3-Flash is actually cheaper than deepseek and better than deepseek but no one is talking about yet :)

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rew0rk

Looking at HF, it looks like the unquantized version is half the size of glm-5.2 756 GB vs 1.51 TB. I wonder how they were able to optimize it this well

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0xbadcafebee

Stealth Ox-Alpha was GLM-5.3-Flash, and Ox-Alpha was a strong coder (way better than DS4Flash). With both GLM 5.3 and GLM 5.3 Flash, I don't think I'll need any better coding models. The main thing I need now is faster, not better.

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chillfox

Seeing the price, I am probably just going to keep using GLM-5.2 until 5.3 gets cheaper.

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keel-control

glm 5.3 flash is the best model I have ever used

ChildOfChaos

How much usage do you find you get on these kinda models (I know the pricing changes a bit) compared to a $20 sub say for Google AI Pro in anti gravity?

I hate how difficult it is to compare prices when looking at subscriptions.

Would $20 in open router, using models like GLM get me more or less?

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alfiedotwtf

I’ve been trying out GLM 5.3 Flash the past < 30 hours, and although I’m only running at Q3, it feels different than most 100B to 200B models I’ve run before... More measured, thorough in thinking, and has so far passed all my private tests (and at Q3).

muditjai

Nice how much does it cost?

rgbrgb

just tested (zai-org/GLM-5.3-Flash via together.ai) against latest DeepSeek-V4-Flash for a very specific task and thought i'd report here...

- price: DS4 wins... $0.0235 vs $0.0242 for ten tasks

- latency: GLM wins... 108s total against 154s

this is for a personal use-case where i'm detecting ads in a written transcript. sticking with ds4-flash for now since latency is not a critical factor