alt Hacker NewsGLM 5.2 Is Out
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Okay so if this model is half a year behind, so let’s say January opus pre-nerf, this is it.
Inference is actually quite cheap for token costs, the frontier labs burn most of their money on training new models, priced into their token costs ontop of some margins and paying record salaries. So if this goes open, distills are tried out, independent providers around the world host it with actual price competition, the house of cards for anthropic collapses pre-ipo. The floor is opus (open models caught up), the current ceiling is Mythos (self inflicted ban due to the safety bullshit theater), and no way out.
It’s really comical I think it’s even the same guy that warned about gpt2 being too dangerous to release, well that mindset seems to now doing existential harm to anthropic, while the rest of the world essentially laughs and progresses anyway.
Seems like there's no official blog post with benchmark results yet. But I'm once again thankful for the Chinese AI labs for being open with their work and contributing it to the world under permissive licenses like this. The Fable 5 fiasco is just another reminder of how valuable these things are to have.
In the last few days, Chinese labs have given us MiniMaxM3, KimiK2.7 and now GLM5.2. Meanwhile US is censoring models. Reads like fiction.
Given the US government’s latest stunt with Fable, this is looking more and more like the future.
Can’t rely on strategic products if they’re gated by capricious actors.
Open weight models are basically immune to that
Released at the exact same time, 5:21 pm (Chinese time), as when Anthropic received the letter from the government banning Fable, and explicitly citing other models becoming unusable.
I'm interested in seeing how this changes folks' workflows.
For me, at work I use opus to plan, brainstorm, grill, ask questions about my codebase, etc. It is pretty good about understanding the codebase holistically and providing architecturally clean solutions that actually work. Then I use sonnet as a plan executor and it does well. Follows instructions and runs tests and just overall does great.
At home I make some toy projects using opencode go (I've standardized on deepseek 4 pro as my opus replacement) but it's pretty obvious from the amount of times I've had to fix or revert a change that broke something that it's no opus. I got similar results with kimi. Have not played too much with Qwen.
So I'm wondering what I'd use to get a similar stack at work. Folks say that this version of glm is basically Jan 2026 opus pre me f. Big if true. So would I use GLM for plan and Deepseek v4 pro/flash for execution? Or maybe Kimi or Qwen? I know I'll probably never get as good quality code as I do at work but I'm just toying around here.
This release was rushed to hang on the coattails of the Mythos drama (“hey, sorry you can’t use Fable, but try us while you wait this weekend!”) I think they planned to release next week, hence benchmarks not all being ready yet.
It's starting to feel like we'll soon be able to run open source models on our own hardware and use them for serious coding projects. Even if some tasks still need to be handed off to larger closed source models, that's a huge improvement over where we are today.
The trend also seems pretty clear. These models will keep getting better. Coding may already be close to a "solved" problem for LLMs. Yes ofc there will always be frontier stuff that you need gigantic cutting edge models for but let's be honest, most software is not that.
I wish they would write a blog post about capabilities of this new model, what to expect from this model, is it cheaper, is it faster or does it have better quality in the outputs.
But still, thank you for the release
Crossing fingers for a 5.2 flash release - it’s been a while but I still feel like 4.7 flash is one of the strongest local coding models
Apparently this isn’t OpenGL Mathematics the C++ library I expected.
Genuine question: How safe is it to use Chinese models via their services? Surely Anthropic and OpenAI are ingesting what I push there as well, but they're at least vaguely allied with my home country geopolitically. China on the other hand seems to be interested in supporting countries like Iran and Russia.
Is there any indication of what compute resources this will actually require (in its various incarnations)? Does it incorporate any of the optimisations pioneered by Google (such as TurboQuant, MTP) or some other original innovations to make the frontier quality realistically available to local users?
This will go the same way other US export restrictions, eventually other nations found ways around to implement similar technologies, and stuff like PGP remains a niche technology, even though public/private keys based technology is widespread.
It's great that we are getting so many open source model releases, but I just feel like SOTA models will always be in the hands of the big players. The hardware requirement to achieve SOTA are just too steep.
My alternate universe would involve some sort of decentralized investing scheme to build data centers running massive open source models that could compete on some level with Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.
For people whohave used GLM 5.1, I'm very curious what 5.2 is like.
I use 5.1 on and off because it chokes on complex tasks (it ends up in a loop. maybe its because i can actually read the though proces, maybe opus does the same but we are not aware).
Curious if 5.2 doesn't have this issue, then I am genuinely switching.
Link to the Coding Plan (only way to get 5.2 right now):
Just checked it out (hat off to my friend who gifted me almost unlimited access to Z.ai) and it's quite darn good.
I'm running different projects in ChatGPT 5.5, Claude (Opus 4.7/4.7) and GLM 5.2 is nice - worth evaluating yourself :)
I would love to give it a try with OpenRouter, but I see it is still not there.
From a very subjective KingBench v3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkFThJWJgg8, the results are promising. Curious for more standardized results as well. And for Simmon's pelican.
Curious what people's experience is with these models. Anecdotally I tried these out earlier in the year and found it struggled with pretty basic full-stack coding I was doing, when Sonnet 4.6 and Haiku 4.5 didn't break a sweat. Was hoping to use it while my Claude usage was resetting but was disappointed.
I don’t know if any open weight Chinese AI engineers are on HN, but thank you for everything you do for information freedom.
Believe it should be available to all eh? Where’s the hf link then?
So no multimodal support yet?
Is it a coincidence that both MiniMax and Z.ai are releasing frontier open weights models right as the USG is trying to impose a cap on model capability offered to the public?
How does is anyone able to run this thing locally without paying too much? (I'm interested in specs or GPU that could handle it)
Always happy when I can use a smart model in a sane harness like pi or mastracode.
I only wish I was able to run this locally
It's gotten really good, just slow as all hell.
" GLM-5.2 is Fully Open " I am curious that: is it open-weight or open-source?
With deluge of Chinese models popping up recently, I believe there's a few issues one needs to evaluate before deciding to use these models:
- Ethics. As known, ou American frontier AI companies are incredibly ethical. And I have yet to see any interviews or blog posts by Chinese companies where they talk about how they are ethical, or at least credible HN comments about it.
- Safety. Do they covertly sabotage or at least refuse to answer questions that could help cyber- and bioterrorists in their nefarious purposes? What about ML-related questions that could help terrorists create AI models without guardrails?
- Child safety. This is especially important with "free for all" open-weight models, most of which are Chinese (ever think about why that's the case?). How are we going to do age verification and KYC with models that anyone can just download on their computer?
- Intellectual property theft. How can we be sure that no output of our American frontier AI models was used while training these Chinese models?
Frankly, there's a plethora of other issues I don't have time to get into right now. Personally, I believe distribution of Chinese models in the US should be paused until they are required to submit models to the government for review and evaluation, to make sure they are made to Anthropic/OpenAI standards.
We need legal grounds for that.
Write to your congressman, congresswoman or congressperson and urge them to stop proliferation of dangerous non-American intelligence. This is a matter of national security and needs to be acted upon as soon as possible, preferably before IPO.
I used to use GLM before I knew about coding subscriptions and it was okay. I've tried every version since 4.6 and this one is doing a great job a spec-implementation runner. If I had to guess... somewhere between Sonnet and Opus in terms of quality. Z.ai's issue has been service reliability. So far so good on day one.
I used 5.1 with a subscription and it was terrible
I thought this would be about GLM the C++ geometric library. Disappointingly it's just AI gunk.
I'm trying to sign up for the API but clicking on Subscribe on any of the plans does nothing.
Anyone else experiencing the same?
I wish the torrent would come before the announcement. Doing it the other way is playing with fire.
this on Cerebras would be fun
Weird, z.ai does not resolve for me. Is there anything special about that domain?
It would be so extremely awesome if this ai would have been a Claude killer alternative and 90% of Europe cancels Claude subscriptions and subscribe on this one. It would be the dumbest move of the year by the US.
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Announcement from the founder of Z.ai:
“ GLM-5.2 is Fully Open, Frontier Intelligence Belongs to Everyone
Today, the sudden restriction of certain frontier models is deeply regrettable. At a time when access to frontier models is abruptly cut off for non-technical reasons, we are even more convinced of one thing: science should be global.
The path to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) must never be enclosed by high walls. We have always believed that AGI should be the cornerstone for all of humanity to collaboratively explore the boundaries of intelligence and solve complex challenges, rather than a privilege monopolized by a few rules and subject to revocation at any moment. In the face of external blockades and restrictions, our attitude is one of radical openness. Frontier intelligence must remain open-source, accessible, and buildable, serving every dedicated developer.
GLM-5.2 is Zhipu's most capable open-source model to date. It not only supports a truly usable 1M context window but also maintains a continuous lead in the independent completion of long-horizon tasks, providing solid foundational support for building complex agent applications. It also continues to be our main engine for creating the strongest domestic coding model.
Tonight at 5:21—at this special moment—GLM-5.2 will officially be available to all GLM Coding Plan users (including Lite / Pro / Max). The API will also go live next week.
A step closer to frontier intelligence for everyone. The future of AI is open, and it is for the people. ModelKey: GLM-5.2”
https://x.com/jietang/status/2065784751345287314