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.
“ 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”
So much of this release note resonates with me, but it's hard to take it seriously from people who hide behind "Tell me about the Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent massacre" getting flagged as "Content Security Warning: The input text data may contain inappropriate content".
GLM 5 and 5.1 models were released openly, so there's a good chance 5.2 will be eventually. Finger-wagging about censorship isn't very constructive with models that can be self-hosted (and tuned, and de-censored).
The good news is if there are multiple frontier AI models from multiple countries with non overlapping sets of restricted answers, we can just use a couple of them to get open answers.
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.
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.
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.
z.ai posted an announcement earlier that day (in GMT+8) saying that they will make GLM-5.2 available later today at 5:21pm so it can't be a coincidence.
5:21 comes twice a day, so they could have got it all ready if they wanted to. But I guess a lot can happen in 12 hours, and it could be a missed opportunity if Fable were re-released in that time.
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 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.
Somewhat. The US Gov can make it illegal to transact with, download, use, etc. foreign open weight models.
Of course, enforcement will be difficult for individuals (businesses will comply by default, and they would all be pulled off Github and other US based hosting locations if they went the sanctions route). But, we are also quickly going down the road of frightening levels of mass surveillance, which could aid enforcement.
The Fable situation sets a very dangerous precedent, and I'm not looking forward the future here. We are losing the fight for information and computing freedom.
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.
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?
I think Z.ai rushed a bit for release, for example GLM 5.2 is only available under the coding plan right now and they didn't do a big write up. Not even some charts and graphs about its performance!
This is around when people were predicting a new GLM to come out, so a couple corners clipped in order to catch the moment. I'm using it right now and it seems decent, but I haven't done heavy work with it yet. The expanded context window is great.
I think it's a possibility, because labs trying to one-up each other is a fairly common phenomenon at this point. Previous Opus releases were immediately followed by GPT releases, for example. At some point the timing stops being a mere coincidence.
No, not really. This has been telegraphed for a long time by everyone involved. HN denizens have been unashamedly anti-ai for years now, so what makes sense is the not knowing part of this audience. Chinese models are also not frontier models.
I still find it baffling how the idea that HN is "unashamedly anti-ai" gets repeated.
Every single model release gets submitted within minutes of an announcement and frequently break 1000+ points within an hour or two. Blog posts about vibe coding or the current flavor of harness/workflow/tool are constantly making the front page. Karpathy's latest writing/presentations or "Learn how LLMs work using X" are perennial front page content.
There were moments in 2023/2024 where all but a handful of posts on the front page were about AI (and not the Reddit r/popular "residents worried about infrasound and EM radiation near new datacenter" variety).
For example, the responses to this very recent post were overwhelmingly praising Gen AI's capabilities:
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
There are counter examples of course but just because HN isn't exclusively AI hype at all times doesn't mean it's "unashamedly anti-AI".
I honestly can't think of any single topic other than the Snowden leaks in 2013/2014 that even comes close to dominating HN discussion like LLMs/GenAI from 2022 to present.
I don’t think we will know. On the one hand, labs hold back until they have something competitive enough to release. So if Fable isn’t around, it removes that pressure. On the other hand, the Chinese labs have been moving fast anyways and are obviously behind, so it’s not any more of a problem to release a model that isn’t the very best.
No, Dario became too tiresome and annoying that someone had to do something. Personally I hope they ban Opus too. It will only provide more support for open models development.
Compare Dario horror posts with this from GLM release:
“ Intelligence should be open, accessible, and ready to build with, empowering every developer, everywhere.”
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.
The funniest thing about this post is not the fact that some people took it as anything but satire, but that it’s likely very close to what the true believers at Antrophic actually think.
Ah, those wacky terrorists and their non-aligned models, trained on copyrighted data to boot. Remember, the only thing that stops a guy with an evil god-in-a-box is a guy with a benevolent god-in-a-box, and only Antrophic can lead us to the second one – but only if we act together as a nation and ban those subversive open weights models!
> Remember, the only thing that stops a guy with an evil god-in-a-box is a guy with a benevolent god-in-a-box, and only Antrophic can lead us to the second one – but only if we act together as a nation and ban those subversive open weights models!
Eliezer Yudkowsky has made this argument explicitly, substituting himself for Anthropic.
Yudkowksy gave up on trying to make a god-in-a-box to stop other gods-in-boxes in 2015. Since then his approach to stopping the gods-in-boxes has been to lobby governments.
Considering I got into a discussion with someone on this very forum who stated that maybe, yes, only Anthropic are reasonable and restrained enough to have access to these powerful models, it is in fact difficult to tell whats satire and whats not.
I've seen all of the parent's points made seriously over the last few weeks by various folks with AI hysteria.
I missed it at first. Then reread it, and wow - this is grade A satire of the sort rarely delivered anymore, probably indeed because of exactly what you're saying.
Closed source, gated access, guzzling up all innovation budget from the country, diverting cities' limited water access, gaming the stock market and convincing leaders to cut jobs across all industries.
Truly we must protect these moral and ethical visionaries.
I don't consider mainland aspects to be "examples of their ideological system working for the world", it works for urban areas in China
and I don't really see their foreign investment to be doing that, I think it complements what the West has done and has high impact in areas that the West ignores or hasn't taken seriously for investment, only a history of pillaging and subsequently aid
their ideological system - usually in name alone - also relies on the whole world eventually being on it for it to work, so the models being so good and available for the people openly instead of as a closed source concoction fits really well
that's what I see and how I got there, what do you see?
Either that or the only reason they've been releasing the models under permissive licenses is that that the only way they have get any attention in a market dominated by American companies.
(Also, they don't need to make a profit because their system does not prioritize profit potential when making investment decisions: it prioritizes alignment with directives out of Beijing, which include keeping up with the West in strategic technologies.)
It is disturbing, and it is hard to blame them. Given the political climate nowadays, I guess it's really hard to tell what is satire and what is real anymore.
Sometimes I see batshit insane takes on places like X, thought they were just satire. Later it turned out the posters were actually being dead serious.
Is this comical satire or what?
I am surprised to see such a dillusional reply. Come on. Intellectual property theft and openai rings a bell? Ethics? Ever tried uncensored versions of gemma4? LLMs have no bad or good etics. Etics are a thin layer on top. Always. You must be joking.
> our American frontier AI companies are incredibly ethical
Ah... sweet summer child.
> Intellectual property theft. How can we be sure that no output of our American frontier AI models was used while training these Chinese models?
The US AI models are already using pirated copyrighted material off the Internet. If Chinese models also do this, they're at least giving it back to the people by releasing their weights as open source.
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.
For personal use I already did a few months back. Dario is more competent than Sam, but even shadier (IMHO).
Anyway, switched to Openrouter through forgecode (or pi/opencode, the jury is still out on this one).
It will take a while, but I believe that also businesses will at least hedge against US companies basically being forced to geo-fence their models. For now is Fable, but they can include any model at any time.
But they have such great AI generated insights on their AI stories:
"Many users praise Zhipu for open-sourcing GLM-5.2 under MIT with a 1M context window as a major step for accessible AI, while others respond with insults and anti-Chinese hostility."
I mean, it reads almost like an abstract of papers I've recently seen, with a similar info-cramming approach (somewhat like an editorial-SEO keyword bloat).
That's disappointing to hear, I remember the reboot news and thought they had a pretty solid team behind it. I guess gaining traction proved too difficult.
I actually found some of it useful. I saw some page where it helpfully pulled tweets from well known people relating to some story. So it’s not just some slop, or that’s how it looked to me.
which is hilarious because i was excited when i heard Digg was coming back. Many platforms are having a difficult time with bots, mass thread manipulation, etc. I'd be interested in a platform which attempted to fix that problem. I thought that was "so obvious" that i figured it was going to exactly be Digg's play. .. nope, just another AI play, as if we are missing those these days.
No idea if zero AI/bots is even possible, but at least an attempt would have me interested. A platform like Reddit/Digg of old, offering human connection, features aimed at less toxicity, etc.
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.
“ 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
Maybe the post was edited afterwards?
Good troll.
https://z.ai/subscribe
Can’t rely on strategic products if they’re gated by capricious actors.
Open weight models are basically immune to that
Somewhat. The US Gov can make it illegal to transact with, download, use, etc. foreign open weight models.
Of course, enforcement will be difficult for individuals (businesses will comply by default, and they would all be pulled off Github and other US based hosting locations if they went the sanctions route). But, we are also quickly going down the road of frightening levels of mass surveillance, which could aid enforcement.
The Fable situation sets a very dangerous precedent, and I'm not looking forward the future here. We are losing the fight for information and computing freedom.
But still, thank you for the release
This is around when people were predicting a new GLM to come out, so a couple corners clipped in order to catch the moment. I'm using it right now and it seems decent, but I haven't done heavy work with it yet. The expanded context window is great.
You think they were sitting on a release waiting for the right marketing moment?
I have seen enough OpenAI and Anthropic carefuly timed marketing plays to expect it.
I would never announce GLM 5.2 in the same day as Fable or Apple's WWDC, for example.
Every single model release gets submitted within minutes of an announcement and frequently break 1000+ points within an hour or two. Blog posts about vibe coding or the current flavor of harness/workflow/tool are constantly making the front page. Karpathy's latest writing/presentations or "Learn how LLMs work using X" are perennial front page content.
There were moments in 2023/2024 where all but a handful of posts on the front page were about AI (and not the Reddit r/popular "residents worried about infrasound and EM radiation near new datacenter" variety).
For example, the responses to this very recent post were overwhelmingly praising Gen AI's capabilities:
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174
Or this post which rocketed to 2000+ points a year ago without bothering to steel man opposing arguments:
My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163063
There are counter examples of course but just because HN isn't exclusively AI hype at all times doesn't mean it's "unashamedly anti-AI".
I honestly can't think of any single topic other than the Snowden leaks in 2013/2014 that even comes close to dominating HN discussion like LLMs/GenAI from 2022 to present.
- 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.
Ah, those wacky terrorists and their non-aligned models, trained on copyrighted data to boot. Remember, the only thing that stops a guy with an evil god-in-a-box is a guy with a benevolent god-in-a-box, and only Antrophic can lead us to the second one – but only if we act together as a nation and ban those subversive open weights models!
Eliezer Yudkowsky has made this argument explicitly, substituting himself for Anthropic.
I've seen all of the parent's points made seriously over the last few weeks by various folks with AI hysteria.
Truly we must protect these moral and ethical visionaries.
From my perspective
and I don't really see their foreign investment to be doing that, I think it complements what the West has done and has high impact in areas that the West ignores or hasn't taken seriously for investment, only a history of pillaging and subsequently aid
their ideological system - usually in name alone - also relies on the whole world eventually being on it for it to work, so the models being so good and available for the people openly instead of as a closed source concoction fits really well
that's what I see and how I got there, what do you see?
(Also, they don't need to make a profit because their system does not prioritize profit potential when making investment decisions: it prioritizes alignment with directives out of Beijing, which include keeping up with the West in strategic technologies.)
Sometimes I see batshit insane takes on places like X, thought they were just satire. Later it turned out the posters were actually being dead serious.
Ah... sweet summer child.
> Intellectual property theft. How can we be sure that no output of our American frontier AI models was used while training these Chinese models?
The US AI models are already using pirated copyrighted material off the Internet. If Chinese models also do this, they're at least giving it back to the people by releasing their weights as open source.
https://z.ai
Anyway, switched to Openrouter through forgecode (or pi/opencode, the jury is still out on this one).
It will take a while, but I believe that also businesses will at least hedge against US companies basically being forced to geo-fence their models. For now is Fable, but they can include any model at any time.
"Many users praise Zhipu for open-sourcing GLM-5.2 under MIT with a 1M context window as a major step for accessible AI, while others respond with insults and anti-Chinese hostility."
No idea if zero AI/bots is even possible, but at least an attempt would have me interested. A platform like Reddit/Digg of old, offering human connection, features aimed at less toxicity, etc.
Instead they give us this AI crap :s
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: BSD is dying
Source: https://twitter.com/i/status/2065704919299235870 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515912)
edit: ouch, I’m a current Digg user. Even donated for their relaunch :(