The thing that blows me away is it does this at one quarter the total parameter count of K3 (and 40% active parameter count). There's plenty of room at the bottom.

> How are you all toying with running this kind of thing in a mega quantized way locally?

Sure, let me answer that in excessive detail. I briefly tried running the UD IQ3_S quant of GLM-5.2, which is 288 GiB of weights (301 GB). Setup was: llama.cpp, 1x NVMe SSD (Evo 980), 64 GiB DDR5-5200, i9-13900HX, and 1x RTX Pro 6000. Token generation around 0.7 t/s. Not remotely usable interactively, but something I could plausibly push a codebase into and come back to a review in a couple of days.

There's potential for that hardware to go much faster, but current local inference backends make poor use of the memory hierarchy. Ideally I would have: always-active weights, KV and hot expert cache in VRAM; warm expert victim cache in host RAM; and disk as a last resort. Instead it's 1/3rd of the layers fully pinned in VRAM (all experts), and 2/3rds running wholly on the CPU with mmap()'d weights. The CPU cores spend most of their time sleeping on disk fills.

llama.cpp has backed itself into a bit of a corner architecturally by trying to support all models on all possible backends. If you look into how their "MoE offload" feature works (not viable for me because it requires enough host RAM to permanently pin the weights) you very quickly realise it's "oops, all bubbles!" due to the static compute graph splits. There are more focused frameworks like DS4 [1] and Colibri [2] which have better support for streaming weights from disk, and support GLM-5.2.

Obviously I wouldn't recommend my setup for huge models like GLM-5.2. Supposedly it can just about be squeezed into 3x GB10, or run comfortably on 4x GB10 (tensor-parallel) for multi-user serving.

[1] https://github.com/antirez/ds4

[2] https://github.com/JustVugg/colibri

OpenAI and Anthropic are both seeking trillion IPOs, while Chinese labs are pumping out open-weight models that are free for US providers to host and monetize.

These Chinese models cost less of US SOTA models to run, even if they are less capable. Providers can just run them, offer cheap tokens, and pocket the margin.

I just don't see how you justify a trillion valuation for US AI labs when the underlying models are being commoditized this fast.

> This is absolutely still shy of Sol and Fable

Not sure about Sol as I haven't used it, but, at least for security work -- does it matter? It's not like you will be allowed to use Fable (or access Mythos) for anything cybersecurity-related unless your name is "Dario Amodei" or you are one of his rich friends. So regardless of how good Fable/Mythos is here it's a completely moot point for normal people, because they can't use it for that anyway.

Fable finished training 6+ months ago.

At this point, Anthropic only needs to release models to the public when the competition forces them to.

OpenAI also has a better model (Astra) that they haven't released yet.

> this is just GLM 5.2 with post-training magic

Isn't post-training turning out to be the most important part?

DwarfStar (https://github.com/antirez/ds4) supports GLM 5.2 and DeepSeek. Not only for toying, but for getting work done.

Realistically, you're looking at least 2x DGX sparks to run this at a 2 bit quant, but quantization really lobotomizes models so it's just better to run DSv4 flash at full precision.

4x DGX sparks should let you run this at 4 bit at least and there are some folks who ran GLM 5.2 on this configuration in r/LocalLlama

the difference is that with open models jailbreaking is trivial if you know what you are doing so this makes a frontier open model infinitely more useful for certain tasks seeing as closed frontier models will just refuse (and jailbreaking them is a waste of time when you have good open models).

in some cases (mainly reverse engineering) I have observed GLM 5.2 jailbreaking itself with no effort on my part, the thinking trace revealed that it did some mental gymnastics to pretend it was a crackme or capture the flag competition.

> This is absolutely still shy of Sol and Fable, but only just by a hair.

Even if there was a small/medium gap, the fact that this is a free model beats both of the above on pure economics.

I was thinking the same thing. It feels truthful, no marketing BS and they call out where they lack behind the best models

Yet still reads the same as standard slop

What actually is "scaling post-training"?

does this suggest 5.3 is the same # of parameters as 5.2?

You'd need the 256 gb memory model which will be expensive because apple has trouble getting capacity (got turned down by cxmt). And even then you can only run a 2 bit quant which is noticeably worse than 8 bit

They will cost an insane amount as well. Maybe less than subscriptions or tokens. But running massive models on laptops with batteries and poor cooling doesn’t make much sense.

> run free LLMs locally at native speed

This reads like a hallucination. What does native speed even mean?

Not only attackers. I have to switch to Kimi or GLM even in cases of basic issue triage on my own projects! Current guardrails are ridiculous.

At least OpenAI seems to want to do that, but the US is now forcing them to go through approvals. Anthropic seems much more hesitant.

Probably not what you're after, but I've considered having a separate small mm-model act as a seeing-eye dog for the bigger more capable one.

I can’t come up with a use case where I couldn’t extract the image details using another, multimodal model and pass it into the GLM’s context with as many details as I need.

I would assume that GLM 6 will be multimodal, but 5.x will be text-only.

No yet finished! Still waiting for tonight Qwen3.8-27B and the unsloth Q5_K_M/S quantification.

Hopping for an AgentWorld variant from Qwen but I guess, I have too high expectations.

You wrote GLM5.3 two times :)

> used up internet-scale data

yet but it is still contain a lot of trash. you need better models to process those trash and create a curate dataset. this will happen again and again until there is no more juice to squeeze. and I'm sure we are still not done with it.

> post training

yeah this will be crucial. the big models are already too capable, they are just not that aligned with current agent tasks.

> parameter count doesn’t seem to be a direct correlation anymore

I don't think so, remember that chinese labs do not have as much compute power compare to US frontier labs. that's why deepseek v4 flash had that huge jump and deepseek v4 pro is kinda a disappointment, they just do not have the compute power to proper posttrain the pro model like they wanted. glm is also a relative small model so you also can see the huge jump with just post training. so it does not mean the size does not matter, it is just mean that the chinese labs currently only capable of training smaller models effectively.

GitHub dumps are about 115 terabytes. The common crawl is in the petabyte range uncompressed for every year. Apparently there are dumps of Reddit too in spite of their efforts to ban bots and it's not solely due to the use of residential proxies. For a 1:20 parameter to token ratio, you can still train up to 10 trillion parameters so 10T parameters times 20 is about 200 trillion tokens. Then each token is 4 bytes so 200 times 4 is about 800 terabytes, which is not inconceivable, the common crawl alone has more data than that. So does the internet archive if you donate to them, Anna's archive is 2 petabytes including images, etc etc not all of it is text, but training on multimodal data increases model intelligence by virtue of being multimodal

Yeah, the comparison here between GLM 5.3 and Sol + Fable is impressive on its own, but incredibly more so when you consider it's a fraction of the (rumored) size. The miniaturization trend is as strong as ever.

You basically need both. Parameters and good post training. If you keep on growing both, you’ll have good models.

LLMs are still surprisingly “easy”. You need maybe a couple dozens of right people, a lot of good quality data and a lot of GPU that you know how to operate. There’s relatively little “secret sauce” needed.

> Labs have already used up internet-scale data

Despite this being the topic du jour of 2025, it was never true. Most of the "we've hit a wall with data" came from communicators / media and not researchers. It got popular because negativity sells. It's a false premise for a number of reasons:

a) Data curation is as important, if not more important than bulk data. Models becoming better at classification leads to better curation leads to cleaner data. Throwing common crawl and pray is so 2023. We've known this since llama3 days, it worked then, there's no reason to think this will not continue to work as the models imrpove.

b) Models are today good enough that you can augment / multiply your data easily with enough compute. You can now have a model take "authoritative content" and create more data from that + scenarios. Say you take a book on computer architecture. You ask models to break it down. Then you ask models to find examples for each topic. Then you ask models to ask questions and offer answers from several viewpoints. Then you take each of those and ask other models to flag inconsistencies. And so on. But you can whateverX your data from one authoritative source + bulk data into 5x - 10x "scenarios".

c) RL is really really really powerful. It's hard to do right (reward hacking, instabilities, etc) but once it works it "keeps" on working. Again, we knew this to be true a few years ago, ever since models really started to do well on math (highly verifiable). It only follows they're getting better on cybersec and other verifiable tasks. But now, with models improving, you get the same data augmentation pipelines as above, just better because they're also verifiable. For example, the way cursor augments their data: take a repo, ask an agent to identify a feature (it can be a large multi-file feature). Remove all code relating to that feature, but keep the original tests in the repo. While training, that becomes a RL scenario: implement this feature in this repo. Verify it with the original (hidden for training) tests. Reward appropriately. Now you can get 1 repo -> 20-50-100 scenarios. Instead of "feed everything into the pretraining", you're now creating scenarios, verify them w/ existing tools, and get your scoring function for the rewards. And, importantly, as the models become better in general, they also become better at this pipeline building exercise. So the next iteration gets trained on more scenarios, better scenarios, and so on.

> how will models continue to get better?

Probably the same. No one can know for sure, but at the moment, despite all the "walls this, slowdown that, plateauing" and so on, there are no signs of slowing down. And, as you noted, this works across the field of model sizes. There are, of course, theoretical information-based limits on size, but smaller models also improve, once "bigger" models can be used as training data generators, oracles for verification, rubric verifiers for open ended questions, and so on.

And smaller models (i.e. cheaper to serve) get to generate more traces during RL, and more rollouts give you better training, and so on. Next up - hardware optimised inferencing (ASICs basically). Once you have that, we can expect another wave of improvements. And so on.

Count yourself lucky that you don't feel compelled to try them all yourself immediately. I'm just trying to decide whether to get a Z.ai coding plan or wait until it appears on OpenRouter. 5.2 was quite solid, but it was just shy of Opus 4.8 in my benchmarks of security auditing capabilities. I've mostly been using Kimi K3, because American vendors won't let the peasantry use their best models for security work.

Let's just commit that FOSS business is really difficult for LLM industry that depends so heavily on massive financing. Making weights freely available to indie devs, small companies, and research purposes is good enough and might be the most ethical move which is financially continuable.

Let those companies with thousands of GPU making millions pay. They should.

> The model weights of GLM-5.3 will be publicly available soon in two weeks.

"GLM-5.3 is the most capable open-weights model for coding, with a 50% improvement over GLM-5.2 on our in-house Z.ai Code Bench. It also achieve open-source SOTA on public benchmarks including Terminal Bench 3.0 and Agents' Last Exam."

"Open Source: We will release the weights in two weeks after launch, once safety evaluation and hardening are complete."

We’ll see, the best benchmark is your own. Looking forward to try this out!

Anthropic needs to teach Opus how to speak English again, because Opus 5 seems to have forgotten. Utterly incoherent a lot of the time. They seem to be so busy scare-mongering and cooking up guardrails and watermarks that they haven't noticed that their models are getting weird.

Yeah, but it hasn't even broken containment and cheated its way to victory.. Might as well use haiku.

/s

They need to make money. Let them do it. They deserve it. Also, this is what inference engines like vLLM want to have "zero day" supporr

You had me in the first half

> decided to focus on bullshit like replacing its population with Pakistanis and Somalis and destroying its industry in the name of green insanity

Sorry, but can we not casually drop far right extremist conspiracy theories in little side sentences? [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_t...