[HN Gopher] GLM-5: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       GLM-5: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering
        
       Author : meetpateltech
       Score  : 343 points
       Date   : 2026-02-11 16:41 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (z.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (z.ai)
        
       | eugene3306 wrote:
       | why don't they publish at ARC-AGI ? too expensive?
        
         | Bolwin wrote:
         | Arc agi was never a good benchmark that tested spatial
         | understanding more than reasoning. I'm glad it's no longer
         | popular
        
           | falcor84 wrote:
           | What do you mean? It definitely tests reasoning as well, and
           | if anything, I expect spatial and embodied reasoning to
           | become more important in the coming years, as AI agents will
           | be expected to take on more real world tasks.
        
           | eugene3306 wrote:
           | spatial or not, arc-agi is the only test that correlates to
           | my impression with my coding requests
        
       | beAroundHere wrote:
       | I'd say that they're super confident about the GLM-5 release,
       | since they're directly comparing it with Opus 4.5 and don't
       | mention Sonnet 4.5 at all.
       | 
       | I am still waiting if they'd launch GLM-5 Air series,which would
       | run on consumer hardware.
        
         | esafak wrote:
         | I place GLM 4.7 behind Sonnet.
        
         | revolvingthrow wrote:
         | Qwen and GLM both promise the stars in the sky every single
         | release and the results are always firmly in the "whatever"
         | range
        
           | CuriouslyC wrote:
           | Qwen famously benchmaxxes. GLM is more robust, I'd say it's
           | comparable to DeepSeek in that regard.
        
       | esafak wrote:
       | I got fed up with GLM-4.7 after using it for a few weeks; it was
       | slow through z.ai and not as good as the benchmarks lead me to
       | believe (esp. with regards to instruction following) but I'm
       | willing to give it another try.
        
         | valvar wrote:
         | Try Cerberas
        
           | odie5533 wrote:
           | I spent $10 in 2 minutes with that and gave up
        
         | w4yai wrote:
         | Synthetic is a bless when it comes to providing OSS models
         | (including GLM), their team is responsive, no downtime or any
         | issue for the last 6 months.
         | 
         | Full list of models provided :
         | https://dev.synthetic.new/docs/api/models
         | 
         | Referal link if you're interested in trying it for free, and
         | discount for the first month :
         | https://synthetic.new/?referral=kwjqga9QYoUgpZV
        
         | esafak wrote:
         | I forgot to add that GLM _loves_ to perform destructive
         | operations; it 'll happily git reset/push to main. Put it on a
         | very tight leash if you use it.
        
       | jnd0 wrote:
       | Probably related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46974853
        
         | cmrdporcupine wrote:
         | yes, plenty of good convo over there, the two should probably
         | be merged
        
       | woah wrote:
       | Is this a lot cheaper to run (on their service or rented GPUs)
       | than Claude or ChatGPT?
        
         | esafak wrote:
         | Yes. https://z.ai/subscribe
        
           | leumon wrote:
           | although apparently only the max subscription includes glm-5
        
             | esafak wrote:
             | Yes, thank you for pointing that out. It's probably load
             | management thing.
        
         | su-m4tt wrote:
         | dramatically cheaper.
        
       | algorithm314 wrote:
       | Here is the pricing per M tokens.
       | https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing
       | 
       | Why is GLM 5 more expensive than GLM 4.7 even when using sparse
       | attention?
       | 
       | There is also a GLM 5-code model.
        
         | logicprog wrote:
         | I think it's likely more expensive because they have more
         | activated parameters, which kind of outweighs the benefits of
         | DSA?
        
         | l5870uoo9y wrote:
         | It's roughly three times cheaper than GPT-5.2-codex, which in
         | turn reflects the difference in energy cost between US and
         | China.
        
           | re-thc wrote:
           | It reflects the Nvidia tax overhead too.
        
             | bigyabai wrote:
             | Not really, Western AI companies can set their margins at
             | whatever they want.
        
           | anthonypasq wrote:
           | 1. electricity costs are at most 25% of inference costs so
           | even if electricity is 3x cheaper in china that would only be
           | a 16% cost reduction.
           | 
           | 2. cost is only a singular input into price determination and
           | we really have absolutely zero idea what the margins on
           | inference even are so assuming the current pricing is
           | actually connected to costs is suspect.
        
       | pu_pe wrote:
       | Really impressive benchmarks. It was commonly stated that open
       | source models were lagging 6 months behind state of the art, but
       | they are likely even closer now.
        
       | justinparus wrote:
       | Been using GLM-4.7 for a couple weeks now. Anecdotally, it's
       | comparable to sonnet, but requires a little bit more instruction
       | and clarity to get things right. For bigger complex changes I
       | still use anthropic's family, but for very concise and well
       | defined smaller tasks the price of GLM-4.7 is hard to beat.
        
         | monooso wrote:
         | This aligns very closely with my experience.
         | 
         | When left to its own devices, GLM-4.7 frequently tries to build
         | the world. It's also less capable at figuring out stumbling
         | blocks on its own without spiralling.
         | 
         | For small, well-defined tasks, it's broadly comparable to
         | Sonnet.
         | 
         | Given how incredibly cheap it is, it's useful even as a
         | secondary model.
        
         | rapind wrote:
         | Anecdotal, but I've been locked to Sonnet for the past 6-8
         | months just because they always seem to introduce throttling
         | bugs with Opus where it starts to devour tokens or falls over.
         | Very interested once open models close the gap to about 6
         | months.
        
       | Aurornis wrote:
       | The benchmarks are impressive, but it's comparing to last
       | generation models (Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2). The competitor models
       | are new, but they would have easily had enough time to re-run the
       | benchmarks and update the press release by now.
       | 
       | Although it doesn't really matter much. All of the open weights
       | models lately come with impressive benchmarks but then don't
       | perform as well as expected in actual use. There's clearly some
       | benchmaxxing going on.
        
         | cmrdporcupine wrote:
         | I tried GLM 5 by API earlier this morning and was impressed.
         | 
         | Particularly for tool use.
        
         | throwup238 wrote:
         | _> Although it doesn 't really matter much. All of the open
         | weights models lately come with impressive benchmarks but then
         | don't perform as well as expected in actual use. There's
         | clearly some benchmaxxing going on._
         | 
         | Agreed. I think the problem is that while they can innovate at
         | algorithms and training efficiency, the human part of RLHF just
         | doesn't scale and they can't afford the massive amount of
         | custom data created and purchased by the frontier labs.
         | 
         | IIRC it was the application of RLHF which solved a lot of the
         | broken syntax generated by LLMs like unbalanced braces and I
         | still see lots of these little problems in every open source
         | model I try. I don't think I've seen broken syntax from the
         | frontier models in over a year from Codex or Claude.
        
           | algorithm314 wrote:
           | Can't they just run the output through a compiler to get
           | feedback? Syntax errors seem easier to get right.
        
             | rockinghigh wrote:
             | They do. Pretty much all agentic models call linting,
             | compiling and testing tools as part of their flow.
        
             | NitpickLawyer wrote:
             | The difference is in scaling. The top US labs have oom more
             | compute available than chinese labs. The difference in
             | general tasks is obvious once you use them. It used to be
             | said that open models are ~6mo behind SotA a year go, but
             | with the new RL paradigm, I'd say the gap is growing. With
             | less compute they have to focus on narrow tasks, resort to
             | poor man's distillation and that leads to models that show
             | benchmaxxing behavior.
             | 
             | That being said, this model is MIT licensed, so it's a net
             | benefit regardless of being benchmaxxed or not.
        
           | ej88 wrote:
           | the new meta is purchasing rl environments where models can
           | be self-corrected (e.g. a compiler will error) after sft +
           | rlhf ran into diminishing returns. although theres still lots
           | of demand for "real world" data for actually economically
           | valuable tasks
        
         | yieldcrv wrote:
         | come on guys, you were using Opus 4.5 literally a week ago and
         | don't even like 4.6
         | 
         | something that is at parity with Opus 4.5 can ship everything
         | you did in the last 8 weeks, ya know... when 4.5 came out
         | 
         | just remember to put all of this in perspective, most of the
         | engineers and people here haven't even noticed any of this
         | stuff and if they have are too stubborn or policy constrained
         | to use it - and the open source nature of the GLM series helps
         | the policy constrained organizations since they can
         | theoretically run it internally or on prem.
        
           | Aurornis wrote:
           | > something that is at parity with Opus 4.5
           | 
           | You're assuming the conclusion
           | 
           | The previous GLM-4.7 was also supposed to be better than
           | Sonnet and even match or beat Opus 4.5 in some benchmarks (
           | https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/glm-4-7 ) but in real world use
           | it didn't perform at that level.
           | 
           | You can't read the benchmarks alone any more.
        
         | InsideOutSanta wrote:
         | _> it 's comparing to last generation models (Opus 4.5 and
         | GPT-5.2)._
         | 
         | If it's anywhere close to those models, I couldn't possibly be
         | happier. Going from GLM-4.7 to something comparable to 4.5 or
         | 5.2 would be an absolutely crazy improvement.
        
           | Aurornis wrote:
           | > Going from GLM-4.7 to something comparable to 4.5 or 5.2
           | would be an absolutely crazy improvement.
           | 
           | Before you get too excited, GLM-4.7 outperformed Opus 4.5 on
           | some benchmarks too - https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/glm-4-7
           | See the LiveCodeBench comparison
           | 
           | The benchmarks of the open weights models are always more
           | impressive than the performance. Everyone is competing for
           | attention and market share so the incentives to benchmaxx are
           | out of control.
        
             | InsideOutSanta wrote:
             | Sure. My sole point is that calling Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2
             | "last generation models" is discounting how good they are.
             | In fact, in my experience, Opus 4.6 isn't much of an
             | improvement over 4.5 for agentic coding.
             | 
             | I'm not immediately discounting Z.ai's claims because they
             | showed with GLM-4.7 that they can do quite a lot with very
             | little. And Kimi K2.5 is genuinely a great model, so it's
             | possible for Chinese open-weight models to compete with
             | proprietary high-end American models.
        
               | Aurornis wrote:
               | I think there are two types of people in these
               | conversations:
               | 
               | Those of us who just want to get work done don't care
               | about comparisons to old models, we just want to know
               | what's good right now. Issuing a press release comparing
               | to old models when they had enough time to re-run the
               | benchmarks and update the imagery is a calculated move
               | where they hope readers won't notice.
               | 
               | There's another type of discussion where some just want
               | to talk about how impressive it is that a model came
               | close to some other model. I think that's interesting,
               | too, but less so when the models are so big that I can't
               | run them locally anyway. It's useful for making
               | purchasing decisions for someone trying to keep token
               | costs as low as possible, but for actual coding work I've
               | never found it useful to use anything other than the best
               | available hosted models at the time.
        
               | ffsm8 wrote:
               | For the record, opus 4.6 was released less then a week
               | ago.
               | 
               | That you think corporations are anything close to quick
               | enough to update their communications on public releases
               | like this only shows that you've never worked in
               | corporate
        
               | buu700 wrote:
               | It's high-interest to me because open models are the
               | ultimate backstop. If the SOTA hosted models all suddenly
               | blow up or ban me, open models mitigate the consequence
               | from "catastrophe" to "no more than six to nine months of
               | regression". The idea that I could run a ~GPT-5-class
               | model on my own hardware (given sufficient capex) or
               | cloud hardware under my control is awesome.
        
               | GorbachevyChase wrote:
               | From a user perspective, I would consider Opus 4.6
               | somewhat of a regression. You can exhaust your the five
               | hour limit in less than half an hour on, and I used up
               | the weekly limit in just two days. The outputs did not
               | feel significantly better than Opus 4.5 and that only
               | feels smarter than Sonnet by degrees. This is running a
               | single session on a pro plan. I don't get paid to
               | program, so API cost matter to me. The experience was
               | irritating enough to make me start looking for an
               | alternative, and maybe GLM is the way to go for hobby
               | users.
        
             | miroljub wrote:
             | Yeah, I'm sure closed source model vendors are doing
             | everything within their power to dumb down benchmarks, so
             | they can look like underdogs and play a pity game against
             | open weight models.
             | 
             | Let's have a serious discussion. Just because Claude PR
             | department coined the term benchmaxxing, we we should not
             | be using it unless they shell out some serious monetes.
        
         | ionelaipatioaei wrote:
         | I think the only advantage that closed models have are the
         | tools around them (claude code and codex). At this point if
         | forced I could totally live with open models only if needed.
        
           | evv wrote:
           | The tooling is totally replicated in open source. OpenCode
           | and Letta are two notable examples, but there are surely
           | more. I'm hacking on one in the evenings.
           | 
           | OpenCode in particular has huge community support around it-
           | possibly more than Claude Code.
        
             | Daviey wrote:
             | It's there now, `opencode models --refresh`
        
             | ionelaipatioaei wrote:
             | I know, I use OpenCode daily but it still feels like it's
             | missing something - codex in my opinion is way better at
             | coding but I honestly feel like that's because OpenAI
             | controls both the model and the harness so they're able to
             | fine tune everything to work together much better.
        
           | quikoa wrote:
           | If tooling really is an advantage why isn't it possible to
           | use the API with a subscription and save money?
        
             | ionelaipatioaei wrote:
             | In my opinion it is because if you control both the model
             | and the harness then you're able to tune everything to work
             | together much better.
        
           | hamdingers wrote:
           | GLM works wonderfully with Claude, just have to set some
           | environment variables and you're off to the races.
        
         | dust42 wrote:
         | They are all just token generators without any intelligence.
         | There is so little difference nowadays that I think in a blind
         | test nobody will be able to differentiate the models - whether
         | open source or closed source.
         | 
         | Today's meme was this question: "The car wash is only 50 meters
         | from my house. I want to get my car washed, should I drive
         | there or walk?"
         | 
         | Here is Claude's answer just right now:
         | 
         | "Walk! At only 50 meters (about 150 feet), it would take you
         | less than a minute to walk there. Driving such a short distance
         | would actually be less convenient - by the time you get in the
         | car, start it, drive, and park, you could already be there on
         | foot. Plus, you'd save fuel and your car would be right there
         | waiting for you after the wash is done."
         | 
         | Here is ChatGPT, also right now:
         | 
         | "Since it's only *50 meters* (about 160 feet), walking makes a
         | lot more sense.
         | 
         | Here's why:
         | 
         | * *It's extremely close* -- you'll get there in under a minute.
         | * *Driving would actually be less efficient* -- by the time you
         | start the car, move it, and park, you're already there. * *Cold
         | starts aren't great for your engine* -- very short drives don't
         | let the engine warm up properly. * *It saves fuel and
         | emissions*, even if it's a tiny amount. * You avoid the hassle
         | of maneuvering such a short distance.
         | 
         | The only time driving might make sense is if:
         | 
         | * The weather is terrible (heavy rain, snow, extreme cold). *
         | You have mobility issues. * The car wash requires you to stay
         | in the vehicle and you don't want to leave it there.
         | 
         | Otherwise, this is a perfect "walk it over" situation. "
         | 
         | Please save us all that talk about frontier and SOTA and that
         | only the closedAI models are any good and the others are all so
         | bad and benchmaxxed. For most purposes a Toyota is just as good
         | as a BMW or a Merc or whatever luxury brand tickles your fancy.
         | Even worse, the lastest 80B Qwen Next is not far from Opus 4.6
         | but runs on my laptop.
        
           | haute_cuisine wrote:
           | Doesn't seem to be the case, gpt 5.2 thinking replies: To get
           | the car washed, the car has to be at the car wash -- so
           | unless you're planning to push it like a shopping cart,
           | you'll need to drive it those 50 meters.
        
           | bonoboTP wrote:
           | It's unclear where the car is currently from your phrasing.
           | If you add that the car is in your garage, it says you'll
           | need to drive to get the car into the wash.
        
             | RohMin wrote:
             | Do you think the average person would need this sort of
             | clarification? How many of us would have recommended to
             | walk?
        
               | bonoboTP wrote:
               | Do you think this is a fundamentally unbridge-able
               | limitation of LLMs? Do you know where we were just a year
               | ago? Can you imagine that this will get better with
               | upcoming releases? It's like when Gary Marcus was
               | confidently stating that AI (at least current paradigm)
               | will never be able to generate an image of a horse riding
               | an astronaut. (Or full wineglasses or arbitrary clocks).
        
           | king_phil wrote:
           | Gemini 3 Pro:
           | 
           | This is a classic logistical puzzle!
           | 
           | Unless you have a very unique way of carrying your vehicle,
           | you should definitely drive.
           | 
           | If you walk there, you'll arrive at the car wash, but your
           | car will still be dirty back at your house. You need to take
           | the car with you to get it washed.
           | 
           | Would you like me to check the weather forecast for $mytown
           | to see if it's a good day for a car wash?
        
             | interloxia wrote:
             | For me, various forms of Gemini respond with "Unless you
             | are planning on carrying the car there" which I find to be
             | just sassy enough to be amusing.
        
           | Scene_Cast2 wrote:
           | I just ran this with Gemini 3 Pro, Opus 4.6, and Grok 4 (the
           | models I personally find the smartest for my work). All three
           | answered correctly.
        
             | miroljub wrote:
             | They had plenty of time to update their system prompts so
             | they don't be embarrassed.
             | 
             | I noticed whenever such meme comes out, if you check
             | immediately you can reproduce it yourself, but after a free
             | hours it's already updated.
        
               | qiine wrote:
               | The road to AGI is weirder than anticipated
        
               | viraptor wrote:
               | I think you're seriously underestimating how much effort
               | the fine tuning at their scale takes and what impact it
               | has. They don't pack every edge case into the system
               | prompt either. It's not like they update the model every
               | few hours or even care about memes. If they seriously
               | did, they'd force-delegate spelling questions to tool
               | calls.
        
               | suzzer99 wrote:
               | Could it be the model is constantly searching its own
               | name for memes, or checking common places like HN and
               | updating accordingly? I have no idea how real-time these
               | things are, just asking.
        
               | viraptor wrote:
               | The model doesn't do anything on its own. And it's
               | usually months in between new model snapshots.
        
               | UrineSqueegee wrote:
               | thats not how it works
        
           | rockinghigh wrote:
           | How is this riddle relevant to a coding model?
        
             | esafak wrote:
             | It's not a coding model. Go to https://chat.z.ai/ and
             | you'll see it is presented as a generalist.
        
           | Aurornis wrote:
           | If you're asking simple riddles, you shouldn't be paying for
           | SOTA frontier models with long context.
           | 
           | This is a silly test for the big coding models.
           | 
           | This is like saying "all calculators are the same, nobody
           | needs a TI-89!" and then adding 1+2 on a pocket calculator to
           | prove your point.
        
             | grey-area wrote:
             | No it's like having a calculator which is unable to perform
             | simple arithmetic, but lots of people think it is amazing
             | and sentient and want to talk about that instead of why it
             | can't add 2 + 2.
        
               | viraptor wrote:
               | We know why it's not going to do precise math and why you
               | can have better experience asking for an app solving the
               | math problem you want. There's no point talking about it
               | - it's documented in many places for people who are
               | actually interested.
        
             | Balinares wrote:
             | I find it's a great test, actually. There are lots of
             | "should I take the car" decisions in putting together
             | software that's supposed to do things, and with poor
             | judgement in how the things should be done, you typically
             | end up with the software equivalent of a Rube-Goldberg
             | machine that harnesses elephants to your car and uses mice
             | to scare the elephants toward the car wash while you walk.
             | After all, it's a short distance, isn't it?
        
           | esafak wrote:
           | This is a great comment. The frontier labs ought to be
           | embarrassed they can't get this right. A human would not make
           | the same mistake, after thinking for a second.
        
           | cherryteastain wrote:
           | Gemini 3 Flash ("Fast" in the web app) did not have trouble
           | with this:
           | 
           | Since you presumably want the car to be clean, the answer
           | depends entirely on how the car is getting washed. The
           | Breakdown If it's a Professional Car Wash: You'll need to
           | drive. Bringing the car to the wash is generally the
           | prerequisite for them washing it. Plus, walking 50 meters
           | just to ask them to come pick up a car that is visible from
           | their front door might result in some very confused looks
           | from the staff. If it's a Self-Service Pressure Washer:
           | Again, drive. Dragging a 1,500kg vehicle 50 meters by hand is
           | an incredible workout, but probably not the "quick chore" you
           | had in mind. If you are hiring a Mobile Detailer: Walk.
           | Stroll over there, tell them where you're parked, and walk
           | back home to watch TV while they do the work in your
           | driveway.
        
           | zozbot234 wrote:
           | 1. Analyze the User's Request:
           | 
           | Distance: 50 meters (very short).
           | 
           | Goal: Get the car washed.
           | 
           | Decision: Drive or walk?
           | 
           | 2. Evaluate the Options:
           | 
           | Option A: Walk
           | 
           | Pros: Healthy, environmentally friendly, no need to find
           | parking (though it's close), easy to chat with neighbors.
           | 
           | Cons: The car is left at the car wash. The user can't "walk"
           | the car to the car wash. The car must be moved to the car
           | wash to be washed.
           | 
           | Option B: Drive
           | 
           | Pros: Moves the car to the location where the service is
           | performed. It's the only logical way to get the car washed.
           | 
           | Cons: Driving 50 meters is technically bad for a cold engine
           | (short trips), uses a negligible amount of fuel, might seem
           | lazy.
           | 
           | 3. Identify the Logical Flaw/Humor:
           | 
           | The user is asking if they should walk _to get their car
           | washed_.
           | 
           | Unless the car wash involves someone coming to their house
           | (mobile wash) or carrying the car, the car must be at the car
           | wash.
           | 
           | Walking _to_ the car wash leaves the car at home. Walking
           | _back_ from the car wash leaves the car at the car wash.
           | 
           | Therefore, the user _must_ drive the car to the car wash.
           | 
           | 4. Formulate the Answer:
           | 
           | Direct Answer: You should drive.
           | 
           | Reasoning: The car needs to be at the car wash to be washed.
           | You cannot walk the car there.
           | 
           | Nuance/Context: 50 meters is a very short distance. Driving a
           | car such a short distance is generally not great for the
           | engine (doesn't allow oil to circulate/warm up properly), but
           | it is necessary in this specific case.
           | 
           | Alternative (if applicable): Is there a mobile wash option?
           | If so, walking isn't even needed. But assuming a standard car
           | wash bay: Drive.
           | 
           | 5. Drafting the response (Internal Monologue/Trial Phrases):
           | 
           | Draft 1: You have to drive. You can't wash the car if it's at
           | your house and you are at the car wash.
           | 
           | Draft 2: You should drive. Since the car needs to be washed,
           | it needs to be at the car wash. Walking there doesn't help
           | get the car clean.
           | 
           | Refining for clarity and wit: Point out the obvious - the car
           | is the object being washed. It needs to move.
           | 
           | Final Polish (similar to the provided good output):
           | 
           | State clearly: You should drive.
           | 
           | Explain why: The car needs to be there.
           | 
           | Add a practical note: Driving 50 meters is a bit silly for
           | engine health, but unavoidable here.
           | 
           | Consider the scenario of "walking back": Maybe the user meant
           | "walk back"? No, the prompt says "drive there or walk there".
           | The intent is transportation to the location.
           | 
           | 6. Constructing the final output:
           | 
           | "You should definitely _drive_. "
           | 
           | "Why? Because the car wash cleans the car, so the car needs
           | to be at the car wash. If you walk, the car stays at home."
           | 
           | "Additional thought: Driving 50 meters is technically a 'cold
           | start' short trip which isn't ideal for the engine, but it's
           | the only way to get the service done!"
           | 
           | Final Output Generation (matching the logic above).
           | 
           | You should _drive_.
           | 
           | Here is why:
           | 
           | 1. _The car needs to be there:_ You are getting the car
           | washed, so the car must be at the car wash. You cannot walk
           | the car there by yourself.
           | 
           | 2. _Efficiency:_ Driving 50 meters takes about 10 seconds.
           | Walking 50 meters takes about a minute, but you would be
           | leaving the car behind.
           | 
           | The only exception is if you are planning to get a _mobile
           | car wash_ (where they come to you) or if you are dropping the
           | car off and walking back home while they clean it. But to
           | simply  "get there," you must drive.
           | 
           | (The above output is from GLM-5)
        
           | smokel wrote:
           | _> They are all just token generators without any
           | intelligence._
           | 
           | Maybe, but "intelligence" doesn't have a clear, agreed
           | definition. And calling them "just token generators" skips
           | over how complex that generation actually is.
        
           | j-bos wrote:
           | GLM 4.7: "You should drive.
           | 
           | Since the goal is to get your car washed, the car needs to be
           | at the car wash. If you walk, you will arrive at the car
           | wash, but your car will still be sitting at home"
           | 
           | Are you sure that question is from this year?
        
           | Hammershaft wrote:
           | Claude 4.6 got it first try:
           | 
           | "You'll want to drive -- you need the car at the car wash for
           | them to wash it!
           | 
           | Even though it's just 50 meters, the car has to be there.
           | Enjoy the fresh clean car on the short drive back! "
        
           | uncharted9 wrote:
           | I tried this prompt with all the major AI models that I know
           | and have installed, and only GLM from Z.ai and Gemini 3 Flash
           | could answer it. Even in that case, Gemini 3 Flash gave a bit
           | more nuanced answer, but every other model like Claude Opus
           | 4.5, Chat GPT, Grok - everything failed.
        
           | UrineSqueegee wrote:
           | this is a bot comment or just ragebait
        
           | vardalab wrote:
           | This is really just a meme. People don't know how to use
           | these tools.
           | 
           | Here is the response from Gpt-5.2 using my default custom
           | instructions in the mac desktop app.
           | 
           | OBJECTIVE: Decide whether to drive or walk to a car wash ~50
           | meters from home, given typical constraints (car must be
           | present for wash).
           | 
           | APPROACH: Use common car-wash workflows + short-distance
           | driving considerations (warm engine, time, parking/queue). No
           | web sources needed (stable, local decision).
           | 
           | OUTPUT: * Default choice: Drive. A car wash generally
           | requires the car on-site, and 50 meters of driving is
           | trivial. * When walking makes sense: * You're going to drop
           | the car off (hand-wash/detail) and pick it up later. * You
           | want to avoid moving the car now (ice, tight parking, you've
           | been drinking, etc.) and someone else will handle the car. *
           | Micro-guidance: * If it's an automatic wash you stay in,
           | drive. * If it's detail/hand wash with a wait, drive there,
           | then walk home (or just wait).
           | 
           | CONFIDENCE: 92/100 Assumptions: It's a normal car wash that
           | requires your car to be there; conditions are safe to drive
           | 50 meters.
        
             | sph wrote:
             | "You're holding it wrong."
        
             | reliabilityguy wrote:
             | Your objective has explicit instruction that car has to be
             | present for a wash. Quite a difference from the original
             | phrasing where the model has to figure it out.
        
               | bwat49 wrote:
               | > Your objective has explicit instruction that car has to
               | be present for a wash.
               | 
               | Which is exactly how you're supposed to prompt an LLM, is
               | the fact that giving a vague prompt gives poor results
               | really suprising?
        
               | reliabilityguy wrote:
               | In this case, with such a simple task, why even bother to
               | prompt it?
               | 
               | The whole idea of this question is to show that pretty
               | often implicit assumptions are not discovered by the LLM.
        
               | J_cst wrote:
               | That's the answer of his LLM which has decomposed the
               | question and built the answer following the op prompt
               | obviously. I think you didn't get it.
        
           | izucken wrote:
           | Tsk tsk thats adversarial prompting. Hostile even. And thats
           | goalposting which is totally not cool, man.
        
           | qwytw wrote:
           | Some snippets from Kimi's 2.5 answer:
           | 
           | "" [...] Since you need to get your car washed, you have to
           | bring the car to the car wash--walking there without the
           | vehicle won't accomplish your goal [...] If it's a self-
           | service wash, you could theoretically push the car 50 meters
           | if it's safe and flat (unusual, but possible) [..] Consider
           | whether you really need that specific car wash, or if a
           | mobile detailing service might come to you [...] """
           | 
           | Which seems slightly (unintentionally) funny.
           | 
           | But to be fair all the Gemini (including flash) and GPT
           | models I tried did understand the quesiton.
        
           | reliabilityguy wrote:
           | Gemini Pro:
           | 
           | You should definitely drive.
           | 
           | If you walk there, your car will still be dirty back at your
           | house! Since the goal is to get the car washed, you have to
           | take it with you.
           | 
           | PS fantastic question!
        
         | dongobread wrote:
         | What a strangely hostile statement on an open weight model.
         | Running like 20 benchmark evaluations isn't trivial by itself,
         | and even updating visuals and press statements can take a few
         | days at a tech company. It's literally been 5 days since this
         | "new generation" of models released. GPT-5.3(-codex) can't even
         | be called via API, so it's impossible to test for some
         | benchmarks.
         | 
         | I notice the people who endlessly praise closed-source models
         | never actually _USE_ open weight models, or assume their drop-
         | in prompting methods and workflow will just work for other
         | model families. Especially true for SWEs who used Claude Code
         | first and now think every other model is horrible because they
         | 're ONLY used to prompting Claude. It's quite scary to see how
         | people develop this level of worship for a proprietary product
         | that is openly distrusting of users. I am not saying this is
         | true or not of the parent poster, but something I notice in
         | general.
         | 
         | As someone who uses GLM-4.7 a good bit, it's easily at Sonnet
         | 4.5 tier - have not tried GLM-5 but it would be surprising if
         | it wasn't at Opus 4.5 level given the massive parameter
         | increase.
        
           | apimade wrote:
           | Isn't trivial? How is it not completely automated at this
           | point?
        
           | maxdo wrote:
           | but even opus 4.5 is history now, codex-5-3 and opus 4.6 are
           | one more step forward. The opus itself caused paradigm shift,
           | from writing code with AI, to ai is writing code with human.
           | 
           | open weight models are not there at all yet.
        
         | miki123211 wrote:
         | Anthropic, OpenAI and Google have real user data that they can
         | use to influence their models. Chinese labs have benchmarks.
         | Once you realize this, it's obvious why this is the case.
         | 
         | You can have self-hosted models. You can have models that
         | improve based on your needs. You can't have both.
        
           | viraptor wrote:
           | zAI, minimax and Kimi have plenty of subscriber usage on
           | their own platforms. They get real data just as well. Less or
           | it maybe but it's there.
        
             | Art9681 wrote:
             | I'm going to claim that the majority of those users are
             | optimizing for cost and not correctness and therefore the
             | quality of data collected from those sessions is
             | questionable. If you're working on something of
             | consequence, you're not using those platforms. If you're a
             | tinkerer pinching pennies, sure.
        
       | petetnt wrote:
       | Whoa, I think GPT-5.3-Codex was a disappointment, but GLM-5 is
       | definitely the future!
        
         | cmrdporcupine wrote:
         | I find 5.3 very impressive TBH. Bigger jump than Opus 4.6.
         | 
         | But this here is excellent value, if they offer it as part of
         | their subscription coding plan. Paying by token could really
         | add up. I did about 20 minutes of work and it cost me $1.50USD,
         | and it's more expensive than Kimi 2.5.
         | 
         | Still 1/10th the cost of Opus 4.5 or Opus 4.6 when paying by
         | the token.
        
           | CuriouslyC wrote:
           | The Pro and Max plans can use it. Pro has 1 concurrent
           | session.
        
         | mnicky wrote:
         | > I think GPT-5.3-Codex was a disappointment
         | 
         | Care to elaborate more?
        
       | meffmadd wrote:
       | It will be tough to run on our 4x H200 node... I wish they stayed
       | around the 350B range. MLA will reduce KV cache usage but I don't
       | think the reduction will be significant enough.
        
       | pcwelder wrote:
       | It's live on openrouter now.
       | 
       | In my personal benchmark it's bad. So far the benchmark has been
       | a really good indicator of instruction following and agentic
       | behaviour in general.
       | 
       | To those who are curious, the benchmark is just the ability of
       | model to follow a custom tool calling format. I ask it to using
       | coding tasks using chat.md [1] + mcps. And so far it's just not
       | able to follow it at all.
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/rusiaaman/chat.md
        
         | manofmanysmiles wrote:
         | I love the idea of chat.md.
         | 
         | I'm developing a personal text editor with vim keybindings and
         | paused work because I couldn't think of a good interface that
         | felt right. This could be it.
         | 
         | I think I'll update my editor to do something like this but
         | with intelligent "collapsing" of extra text to reduce visual
         | noise.
        
         | nolist_policy wrote:
         | Could also be the provider that is bad. Happens way too often
         | on OpenRouter.
        
           | pcwelder wrote:
           | I had added z-ai in allow list explicitly and verified that
           | it's the one being used.
        
         | sergiotapia wrote:
         | Be careful with openrouter. They routinely host quantized
         | versions of models via their listed providers and the models
         | just suck because of that. Use the original providers only.
        
           | nullbyte wrote:
           | I specifically do not use the CN/SG based original provider
           | simply because I don't want my personal data traveling across
           | the pacific. I try to only stay on US providers. Openrouter
           | shows you what the quantization of each provider is, so you
           | can choose a domestic one that's FP8 if you want
        
         | data-ottawa wrote:
         | Custom tool calling formats are iffy in my experience. The
         | models are all reinforcement learned to follow specific ones,
         | so it's always a battle and feels to me like using the tool
         | wrong.
         | 
         | Have you had good results with the other frontier models?
        
       | ExpertAdvisor01 wrote:
       | They increased their prices substantially
        
       | woeirua wrote:
       | It might be impressive on benchmarks, but there's just no way for
       | them to break through the noise from the frontier models. At
       | these prices they're just hemorrhaging money. I can't see a path
       | forward for the smaller companies in this space.
        
         | syntaxing wrote:
         | Tim Dettmers had an interesting take on this [1].
         | Fundamentally, the philosophy is different.
         | 
         | >China's philosophy is different. They believe model
         | capabilities do not matter as much as application. What matters
         | is how you use AI.
         | 
         | https://timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why-agi-will-not-happen/
        
           | woeirua wrote:
           | Sorry, but that's an exceptionally unimpressive article. The
           | crux of his thesis is:
           | 
           | >The main flaw is that this idea treats intelligence as
           | purely abstract and not grounded in physical reality. To
           | improve any system, you need resources. And even if a
           | superintelligence uses these resources more effectively than
           | humans to improve itself, it is still bound by the scaling of
           | improvements I mentioned before -- linear improvements need
           | exponential resources. Diminishing returns can be avoided by
           | switching to more independent problems - like adding one-off
           | features to GPUs - but these quickly hit their own
           | diminishing returns.
           | 
           | Literally everyone already knows the problems with scaling
           | compute and data. This is not a deep insight. His assertion
           | that we can't keep scaling GPUs is apparently not being taken
           | seriously by _anyone_ else.
        
             | qprofyeh wrote:
             | There are startups in this space getting funded as we
             | speak: https://olix.com/blog/compute-manifesto
        
             | syntaxing wrote:
             | Was more mentioning the article about the economic aspect
             | of China vs US in terms of AI.
             | 
             | While I do understand your sentiment, it might be worth
             | noting the author is the author of bitandbytes. Which is
             | one of the first library with quantization methods built in
             | and was(?) one of the most used inference engines. I'm
             | pretty sure transformers from HF still uses this as the
             | Python to CUDA framework
        
           | re-thc wrote:
           | When you have export restrictions what do you expect them to
           | say?
           | 
           | > They believe model capabilities do not matter as much as
           | application.
           | 
           | Tell me their tone when their hardware can match up.
           | 
           | It doesn't matter because they can't make it matter (yet).
        
         | riku_iki wrote:
         | maybe being in China gives them advantage of electricity cost,
         | which could be big chunk of bill..
        
           | riku_iki wrote:
           | Also, LLM prices include all other capital expenditures:
           | building/maintaining datacenter, paying salary to SWEs, fees
           | to financial transactions (investments) middlemen, which
           | could be much cheaper in China.
        
         | lukev wrote:
         | I expect that the reason for their existence is political
         | rather than financial (though I have no idea how that's
         | structured.)
         | 
         | It's a _big deal_ that open-source capability is less than a
         | year behind frontier models.
         | 
         | And I'm very, very glad it is. A world in which LLM technology
         | is exclusive and proprietary to three companies from the same
         | country is not a good world.
        
       | karolist wrote:
       | The amount of times benchmarks of competitors said something is
       | close to Claude and it was remotely close in practice in the past
       | year: 0
        
         | ionelaipatioaei wrote:
         | I honestly feel like people are brainwashed by anthropic
         | propaganda when it comes to claude, I think codex is just way
         | better and kimi 2.5 (and I think glm 5 now) are perfectly fine
         | for a claude replacement.
        
           | mark_l_watson wrote:
           | So much money is on the line for US super scalers that they
           | probably pay for 'pushes' on social media. Maybe Chinese
           | companies are doing the same.
        
             | GorbachevyChase wrote:
             | I would say that's more certain than just a "probably". I
             | would bet that some of the ridiculous fear mongering about
             | language models trying to escape their server, blackmail
             | their developers, or spontaneously participating in a
             | social network are all clandestine marketing campaigns. The
             | technology is certainly amazing and very useful, but I
             | don't think any of these terminator stories were boosted by
             | the algorithms on their own.
        
           | sumedh wrote:
           | > I think codex is just way better
           | 
           | Codex was super slow till 5.2 codex. Claude models were
           | noticeably faster.
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46974853
        
       | nullbyte wrote:
       | GLM 5 beats Kimi on SWE bench and Terminal bench. If it's
       | anywhere near Kimi in price, this looks great.
       | 
       | Edit: Input tokens are twice as expensive. That might be a deal
       | breaker.
        
         | westernzevon wrote:
         | It seems to be much better at first pass tho. We'll see how
         | real costs stack up
        
         | bradfa wrote:
         | GLM-5 at FP8 should be similar in hardware demands to Kimi-K2.5
         | (natively INT4) I think. API pricing on launch day may or may
         | not really indicate longer term cost trends. Even Kimi-K2.5 is
         | very new. Give it a whirl and a couple weeks to settle out to
         | have a more fair comparison.
        
       | simonw wrote:
       | Pelican generated via OpenRouter:
       | https://gist.github.com/simonw/cc4ca7815ae82562e89a9fdd99f07...
       | 
       | Solid bird, not a great bicycle frame.
        
         | btown wrote:
         | Thank you for continuing to maintain the only benchmarking
         | system that matters!
         | 
         | Context for the unaware:
         | https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/
        
           | gabiruh wrote:
           | It's interesting how some features, such as green grass, a
           | blue sky, clouds, and the sun, are ubiquitous among all of
           | these models' responses.
        
             | btown wrote:
             | If you were a pelican, wouldn't you want to go cycling on a
             | sunny day?
             | 
             | Do electric pelicans dream of touching electric grass?
        
             | derefr wrote:
             | It is odd, yeah.
             | 
             | I'm guessing both humans and LLMs would tend to get the
             | "vibe" from the pelican task, that they're essentially
             | being asked to create something like a child's crayon
             | drawing. And that "vibe" then brings with it associations
             | with all the types of things children might normally
             | include in a drawing.
        
           | l_eo wrote:
           | They will start to max this benchmark as well at some point.
        
             | ljm wrote:
             | It's not a benchmark though, right? Because there's no
             | control group or reference.
             | 
             | It's just an experiment on how different models interpret a
             | vague prompt. "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a
             | bicycle" is loaded with ambiguity. It's practically
             | designed to generate 'interesting' results because the
             | prompt is not specific.
             | 
             | It also happens to be an example of the least practical way
             | to engage with an LLM. It's no more capable of reading your
             | mind than anyone or anything else.
             | 
             | I argue that, in the service of AI, there is a lot of
             | flexibility being created around the scientific method.
        
               | tylervigen wrote:
               | For 2026 SOTA models I think that is fair.
               | 
               | For the last generation of models, and for today's
               | flash/mini models, I think there is still a not-
               | unreasonable binary question ("is this a pelican on a
               | bicycle?") that you can answer by just looking at the
               | result: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/25/pelicans-
               | on-a-bicycle/
        
               | interstice wrote:
               | So if it can generate exactly what you had in mind based
               | presumably on the most subtle of cues like your personal
               | quirks from a few sentences that could be _terrifying_,
               | right?
        
         | _joel wrote:
         | Now this is the test that matters, cheers Simon.
        
         | pwython wrote:
         | How many pelican riding bicycle SVGs were there before this
         | test existed? What if the training data is being polluted with
         | all these wonky results...
        
           | nerdsniper wrote:
           | You're correct. It's not as useful as it (ever?) was as a
           | measure of performance...but it's fun and brings me joy.
        
           | bwilliams18 wrote:
           | I'd argue that a models ability to ignore/manage/sift through
           | the noise added to the training set from other LLMs increases
           | in importance and value as time goes on.
        
         | solarized wrote:
         | This Pelican benchmark has become irrelevant. SVG is already
         | ubiquitous.
         | 
         | We need a new, authentic scenario.
        
           | viraptor wrote:
           | Like identifying names of skateboard tricks from the
           | description? https://skatebench.t3.gg/
        
             | alargemoose wrote:
             | I don't care how practical it may or may not be, this is my
             | new favorite LLM benchmark
        
             | hmottestad wrote:
             | o3-pro is better than 5.2 pro! And GPT 5 high is best.
             | Really quite interesting.
        
             | stevage wrote:
             | I couldn't find an about page or similar?
        
               | viraptor wrote:
               | Here's the public sample https://github.com/T3-Content/sk
               | atebench/blob/main/bench/tes...
               | 
               | I don't think there's a good description anywhere.
               | https://youtube.com/@t3dotgg talks about it from time to
               | time.
        
           | echelon wrote:
           | 1. Take the top ten searches on Google Trends           (on
           | day of new model release)       2. Concatenate       3. SHA-1
           | hash them       4. Use this as a seed to perform random noun-
           | verb           lookup in an agreed upon large sized
           | dictionary.        5. Construct a sentence using an agreed
           | upon stable           algorithm that generates reasonably
           | coherent prompts          from an immensely deep probability
           | space.
           | 
           | That's the prompt. Every existing model is given that prompt
           | and compared side-by-side.
           | 
           | You can generate a few such sentences for more samples.
           | 
           | Alternatively, take the top ten F500 stock performers. Some
           | easy signal that provides enough randomness but is easy to
           | agree upon and doesn't provide enough time to game.
           | 
           | It's also something teams can pre-generate candidate problems
           | for to attempt improvement across the board. But they won't
           | have the exact questions on test day.
        
         | RC_ITR wrote:
         | The bird not having wings, but all of us calling it a 'solid
         | bird' is one of the most telling examples of the AI
         | expectations gap yet. We even see its own reasoning say it
         | needs 'webbed feet' which are nowhere to be found in the image.
         | 
         | This pattern of considering 90% accuracy (like the level we've
         | seemingly we've stalled out on for the MMLU and AIME) to be
         | 'solved' is really concerning for me.
         | 
         | AGI has to be 100% right 100% of the time to be AGI and we
         | aren't being tough enough on these systems in our evaluations.
         | We're moving on to new and impressive tasks toward some
         | imagined AGI goal without even trying to find out if we can
         | make true Artificial Niche Intelligence.
        
           | Rudybega wrote:
           | MMLU performance caps out around 90% because there are tons
           | of errors in the actual test set. There's a pretty solid post
           | on it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/163x
           | 2wc/philip_...
           | 
           | As far as I can tell for AIME, pretty much every frontier
           | model gets 100% https://llm-stats.com/benchmarks/aime-2025
        
       | surrTurr wrote:
       | we're seeing so many LLM releases that they can't even keep their
       | benchmark comparisons updated
        
       | cherryteastain wrote:
       | What is truly amazing here is the fact that they trained this
       | entirely on Huawei Ascend chips per reporting [1]. Hence we can
       | conclude the semiconductor to model Chinese tech stack is only 3
       | months behind the US, considering Opus 4.5 released in November.
       | (Excluding the lithography equipment here, as SMIC still uses
       | older ASML DUV machines) This is huge especially since just a few
       | months ago it was reported that Deepseek were not using Huawei
       | chips due to technical issues [2].
       | 
       | US attempts to contain Chinese AI tech totally failed. Not only
       | that, they cost Nvidia possibly trillions of dollars of exports
       | over the next decade, as the Chinese govt called the American
       | bluff and now actively disallow imports of Nvidia chips as a
       | direct result of past sanctions [3]. At a time when Trump admin
       | is trying to do whatever it can to reduce the US trade imbalance
       | with China.
       | 
       | [1] https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/chinas-ai-startup-
       | zhipu-r...
       | 
       | [2] https://www.techradar.com/pro/chaos-at-deepseek-
       | as-r2-launch...
       | 
       | [3] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-customs-agents-
       | to...
        
         | re-thc wrote:
         | > What is truly amazing here is the fact that they trained this
         | entirely on Huawei Ascend chips
         | 
         | Has any of these outfits ever publicly stated they used Nvidia
         | chips? As in the non-officially obtained 1s. No.
         | 
         | > US attempts to contain Chinese AI tech totally failed. Not
         | only that, they cost Nvidia possibly trillions of dollars of
         | exports over the next decade, as the Chinese govt called the
         | American bluff and now actively disallow imports of Nvidia
         | chips
         | 
         | Sort of. It's all a front. On both sides. China still ALWAYS
         | had access to Nvidia chips - whether that's the "smuggled" 1s
         | or they run it in another country. It's not costing Nvidia
         | much. The opening of China sales for Nvidia likewise isn't as
         | much of a boon. It's already included.
         | 
         | > At a time when Trump admin is trying to do whatever it can to
         | reduce the US trade imbalance with China
         | 
         | Again, it's a front. It's about news and headlines. Just like
         | when China banned lobsters from a certain country, the only
         | thing that happened was that they went to Hong Kong or
         | elsewhere, got rebadged and still went in.
        
           | cherryteastain wrote:
           | > Has any of these outfits ever publicly stated they used
           | Nvidia chips? As in the non-officially obtained 1s. No.
           | 
           | Uh yes? Deepseek explicitly said they used H800s [1]. Those
           | were not banned btw, at the time. Then US banned them too.
           | Then US was like 'uhh okay maybe you can have the H200', but
           | then China said not interested.
           | 
           | [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19437
        
             | re-thc wrote:
             | > Uh yes? Deepseek explicitly said they used H800s [1].
             | Those were not banned btw, at the time
             | 
             | Then they haven't. I said the non-officially obtained 1s
             | that they can't / won't mention i.e. those Blackwells
             | etc...
        
         | seydor wrote:
         | We can conclude that they ll flood the world with huawei
         | inference chips from Temu and create worldwide AI pollution
        
         | mark_l_watson wrote:
         | US Secretary of State Bressent just publicly said that the US
         | needs to get along and cooperate with China. His tone was so
         | different than previously in the last year that I listened to
         | the video clip twice.
         | 
         | Obviously for the average US tax payer getting along with China
         | is in our interests - not so much our economic elites.
         | 
         | I use both Chinese and US models, and Mistral in Proton's
         | private chat. I think it makes sense for us to be flexible and
         | not get locked in.
        
           | Havoc wrote:
           | >His tone was so different than previously in the last year
           | that I listened to the video clip twice.
           | 
           | US bluff got called. A year back it looked like US held all
           | the cards and could squeeze others without negative
           | consequences. i.e. have cake and eat it too
           | 
           | Since then: China has not backed down, Europe is talking de-
           | dollarization, BRICS is starting to find a new gear on
           | separate financial system, merciless mocking across the
           | board, zero progress on ukraine, fed wobbled, focus on gold
           | as alternate to US fiat, nato wobbled, endless scandals,
           | reputation for TACO, weak employment, tariff chaos, calls for
           | withdrawal of gold from US's safekeeping, chatter about
           | dumping US bonds, multiple major countries being quite
           | explicit about telling trump to get fucked
           | 
           | Not at all surprised there is a more modest tone...none of
           | this is going the "without negative consequences" way
           | 
           | >Mistral in Proton's private chat
           | 
           | TIL
        
             | throw101010 wrote:
             | Who could have predicted that cooperation with decades old
             | allies would be more fruitful than spitting in their faces
             | and threatening them on a weekly basis both economically
             | and militarily... really nobody /s
             | 
             | And yes, the consequence is strengthening the actual
             | enemies of the USA, their AI progress is just one symptom
             | of this disastrous US administration and the incompetence
             | of Donald Trump. He really is the worst President of the
             | USA ever, even if you were to just judge him on his
             | leadership regarding technology... and I'm saying this
             | while he is giving a speech about his "clean beautiful
             | coal" right now in the White House.
        
         | bertili wrote:
         | Exactly. The emperor has no clothes. The largest investments in
         | US tech in history and yet there less than a year of moat.
         | OpenAI or Anthropic will not be able to compete with Chinese
         | server farms and so the US strategy is misplaced investments
         | that will come home to roast.
         | 
         | And we will have Deepseek 4 in a few days...
        
         | raingrove wrote:
         | To be fair, the US ban on Nvidia chip exports to China began
         | under the Biden administration in 2022. By the time Trump took
         | office, it was already too late.
        
       | mohas wrote:
       | I kinda feel this bench-marking thing with Chinese models is like
       | university Olympiads, they specifically study for those but when
       | time comes for the real world work they seriously lack behind.
        
         | OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
         | I kinda feel like the goalposts are shifting. While we're not
         | there yet, in a world where Chinese models surpass Western
         | ones, HN will be nitpicking edge cases long after the ship
         | sails
        
           | Oras wrote:
           | I don't think it's undermining the effort and improvement,
           | but usability of these models aren't usually what their
           | benchmarks suggest.
           | 
           | Last time there was a hype about GLM coding model, I tested
           | it with some coding tasks and it wasn't usable when comparing
           | with Sonnet or GPT-5
           | 
           | I hope this one is different
        
       | goldenarm wrote:
       | If you're tired of cross-referencing the cherry-picked
       | benchmarks, here's the geometric mean of SWE-bench Verified &
       | HLE-tools :
       | 
       | Claude Opus 4.6: 65.5%
       | 
       | GLM-5: 62.6%
       | 
       | GPT-5.2: 60.3%
       | 
       | Gemini 3 Pro: 59.1%
        
       | mnicky wrote:
       | What I haven't seen discussed anywhere so far is how big a lead
       | Anthropic seems to have in intelligence per output token, e.g. if
       | you look at [1].
       | 
       | We already know that intelligence scales with the log of tokens
       | used for reasoning, but Anthropic seems to have much more
       | powerful non-reasoning models than its competitors.
       | 
       | I read somewhere that they have a policy of not advancing
       | capabilities too much, so could it be that they are sandbagging
       | and releasing models with artificially capped reasoning to be at
       | a similar level to their competitors?
       | 
       | How do you read this?
       | 
       | [1] https://imgur.com/a/EwW9H6q
        
         | phamilton wrote:
         | Intelligence per token doesn't seem quite right to me.
         | 
         | Intelligence per <consumable> feels closer. Per dollar, or per
         | second, or per watt.
        
           | mnicky wrote:
           | It is possible to think of tokens as some proxy for thinking
           | space. At least reasoning tokens work like this.
           | 
           | Dollar/watt are not public and time has confounders like
           | hardware.
        
       | seydor wrote:
       | I wish China starts copying Demis' biotech models as well soon
        
       | dana321 wrote:
       | Just tried it, its practically the same as glm-4.7 - it isn't as
       | "wide" as claude or codex so even on a simple prompt is misses
       | out on one important detail - instead of investigating it ploughs
       | ahead with the next best thing it thinks you asked for instead of
       | investigating fully before starting a project.
        
       | tgtweak wrote:
       | Why are we not comparing to opus 4.6 and gpt 5.3 codex...
       | 
       | Honestly these companies are so hard to takes seriously with
       | these release details. If it's an open source model and you're
       | only comparing open source - cool.
       | 
       | If you're not top in your segment, maybe show how your token cost
       | and output speed more than make up for that.
       | 
       | Purposely showing prior-gen models in your release comparison
       | immediately discredits you in my eyes.
        
         | rolymath wrote:
         | I feel like you're over reacting.
         | 
         | They're comparing against 5.2 xhigh, which is arguably better
         | than 5.3. The latest from openai isn't smarter, it's slightly
         | dumber, just much faster.
        
       | unltdpower wrote:
       | I predict a new speculative market will emerge where adherents
       | buy and sell misween coded companies.
       | 
       | Betting on whether they can actually perform their sold
       | behaviors.
       | 
       | Passing around code repositories for years without ever trying to
       | run them, factory sealed.
        
       | 2001zhaozhao wrote:
       | GLM-4.7-Flash was the first local coding model that I felt was
       | intelligent enough to be useful. It feels something like Claude
       | 4.5 Haiku at a parameter size where other coding models are still
       | getting into loops and making bewilderingly stupid tool calls. It
       | also has very clear reasoning traces that feel like Claude, which
       | does result in the ability to inspect its reasoning to figure out
       | why it made certain decisions.
       | 
       | So far I haven't managed to get comparably good results out of
       | any other local model including Devstral 2 Small and the more
       | recent Qwen-Coder-Next.
        
         | khimaros wrote:
         | minimax-m.2 is close
        
       | kristianp wrote:
       | So that was pony alpha (1). Now what's Aurora Alpha?
       | 
       | (1) https://openrouter.ai/openrouter/pony-alpha
        
       | Havoc wrote:
       | Been playing with it in opencode for a bit and pretty impressed
       | so far. Certainly more of an incremental improvement than a big
       | bang change, but it does seem better a good bit better than 4.7,
       | which in turn was a modest but real improvement over 4.6.
       | 
       | Certainly seems to remember things better and is more stable on
       | long running tasks.
        
       | CDieumegard wrote:
       | Interesting timing -- GLM-4.7 was already impressive for local
       | use on 24GB+ setups. Curious to see when the distilled/quantized
       | versions of GLM-5 drop. The gap between what you can run via API
       | vs locally keeps shrinking. I've been tracking which models
       | actually run well at each RAM tier and the Chinese models (Qwen,
       | DeepSeek, GLM) are dominating the local inference space right now
        
       | Alifatisk wrote:
       | While GLM-5 seems impressive, this release also included lots of
       | new cool stuff!
       | 
       | > GLM-5 can turn text or source materials directly into .docx,
       | .pdf, and .xlsx files--PRDs, lesson plans, exams, spreadsheets,
       | financial reports, run sheets, menus, and more.
       | 
       | A new type of model has joined the series, GLM-5-Coder.
       | 
       | GLM-5 was trained on Huawei Ascend, last time when DeepSeek tried
       | to use this chip, it flopped and they resorted to Nvidia again.
       | This time seems like a success.
       | 
       | Looks like they also released their own agentic IDE,
       | https://zcode.z.ai
       | 
       | I don't know if anyone else knows this but Z.ai also released new
       | tools excluding the Chat! There's Zread (https://zread.ai), OCR
       | (seems new? https://ocr.z.ai), GLM-Image gen https://image.z.ai
       | and Voice cloning https://audio.z.ai
       | 
       | If you go to chat.z.ai, there is a new toggle in the prompt
       | field, you can now toggle between chat/agentic. It is only
       | visible when you switch to GLM-5.
       | 
       | Very fascinating stuff!
        
       | mohsen1 wrote:
       | I am using it with Claude Code and so far so good. Can't tell if
       | it's as good as Opus 4.6 or not yet
        
       | Aeroi wrote:
       | benchmark and pricing made me realize how good kimi 2.5 is. im an
       | opus 4.6 person but wow, its almost 5x cheaper.
        
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