GLM-5.3-Flash

Weights on HF here: https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-5.3-Flash I decided to take the plunge and get myself four sparks at a decent price (and bought the QSFP cables from AliExpress because they are literally 1/2 the price of Amazon), even knowing Apple was going to release new hardware and there's probably a spark 2 on the horizon. It looks like this is going to be a decent fit for what I need. I've been experimenting with a two-node DS4 and it's _good_ at some tasks, but it really just spins its wheels when it hits the limit of what it can reason through. I can offload mundane/basic tasks to DS4 on two sparks, but I've been pushing it harder on some novel work and it just can't run on its own at all beyond a certain complexity level. I would love to see an Opus-4.8-level local model but TBH I just haven't got there yet. The models I've tried so far _are_ good but they aren't able to solve tough technical challenges, regardless of harness/prompting/etc.

This is going so fast! What a time to be on hackernews: July 16th: The "Kimi K3 moment" - China has caught up to Opus! 4 weeks later: GLM 5.3 - Same performance, but cut the amount of parameters and cost to a third! 12 days later: GLM 5.3 Flash - Almost GLM5.3 performance but cut the parameters in half, cut prices to a fifth and serving on Chinese chips!

Chinese labs are so used to manipulating benchmarks to try to flatter inferior models that when they finally have one that's really pretty good I think the official announcement here undersells it. https://deepswe.datacurve.ai/ That's pretty solid. Smarter and cheaper than Luna xhigh, not as smart but less expensive than Luna max. Smashes deepseek v4 flash, and even worse it matches v4 pro at a tiny fraction the cost. Roughly equivalent to sol medium, at a fraction the cost. They should've just lead with real, up to date data, because it's good, not the silly old tactics like comparing to Opus 4.8 when 5.0 is out in many of their charts. Congrats to them!

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If you're on opencode's go $10/mo plan and want to use GLM-5.3-flash right now on pi, you can add this to models.json until pi updates to support it: { "providers": { "opencode-go": { "models": [ { "id": "glm-5.3-flash", "name": "GLM-5.3 Flash", "api": "openai-completions", "baseUrl": "https://opencode.ai/zen/go/v1", "reasoning": true, "input": ["text", "image"], "cost": { "input": 0.15, "output": 0.5, "cacheRead": 0.03, "cacheWrite": 0 }, "compat": { "supportsStore": false, "supportsDeveloperRole": false, "maxTokensField": "max_tokens" }, "contextWindow": 1000000, "maxTokens": 131072, "thinkingLevelMap": { "off": null, "minimal": null, "low": "low", "medium": null, "high": "high", "xhigh": null, "max": "max" } } ] } } }