GLM-5.3-Flash Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis

(artificialanalysis.ai)

111 points | by theanonymousone 3 hours ago ago

34 comments

  • CGamesPlay 2 hours ago

    Several factual errors about the model here. The input modalities are listed as text only, but the headline feature is image support. The context length should be 1048576 (so should GLM-5.3's, also wrong on the charts).

    https://docs.z.ai/guides/vlm/glm-5.3-flash#model-api

  • yipinwong 44 minutes ago

    The analysis is still not compelling for me to switch from gtp5.6-luna to GLM-5.3-flash given

    - costs per task $0.05 vs $0.09

    - speed 130 vs 88

    - where GLM has only 5 more intelligence point: at this point few point is meaningless for most of models

    https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/comparisons/glm-5-3-fla...

    Been using Luna exclusively since the price drop, and i've been very satified with all tasks from planning, writing code, and other agent tasks. (just change thinking level from low <-> ultra)

    ---

    btw, I did try out Ox Alpha, the coding feels good but still not way better for me to switch to it.

    • psadri 38 minutes ago

      Luna is at a very compelling point on the price/performance curve.

      I have found that sometimes a smaller model with max reasoning is actually more expensive than using the next tier model with a lower reasoning effort. It’s certainly faster.

    • TacticalCoder 27 minutes ago

      > The analysis is still not compelling for me to switch from gtp5.6-luna to GLM-5.3-flash given ...

      So Luna is competitive because a few weeks ago they did a 80% price drop?

      Many here said that 80% drop was not a move against Anthropic but a move against chinese models and your comments indicate that's the case.

  • m_ke 2 hours ago

    So how exactly is Anthropic and OpenAI ever going to pay back the trillions that they plan on spending?

    • Marha01 an hour ago

      > So how exactly is Anthropic and OpenAI ever going to pay back the trillions that they plan on spending?

      It's really simple: if they truly get to human-level AI (or even superhuman AI), then money and debts no longer matter, since our current economic system will be obsolete. They are betting everything on this outcome.

      I don't know if they will manage to do it before their debts have to be repaid, but considering the rate of acceleration in the past few months, there is a non-trivial chance that they will, IMHO. We will see.

      • LeBit 17 minutes ago

        That’s like building F1 cars and thinking you will soon have a rocket to land on the moon.

        LLM has nothing to do with AGI.

      • my002 41 minutes ago

        That's assuming that human-level AI is a possibility with current approaches.

        • traverseda 18 minutes ago

          No, it's assuming there's a non-trivial chance that they will.

        • thatwasunusual 17 minutes ago

          I'd assume we want at least human-level intelligence, but better than human-level _decision making_. ;)

    • gruez an hour ago

      You could ask the same about how z.ai, moonshot ai, minimax, and alibaba are going to continue training and releasing models for free.

      • npn 37 minutes ago

        1. they still have revenue though. it might not enough to cover all the r&d but it is surely enough to cover the hardware cost.

        2. people tend to ignore this, but the salary budget of a US frontier lab and chinese frontier lab is nowhere comparable, the first can easily outdone the later by 100x.

        3. us labs, like other US style startups, always throw ton of money to capture the market. I don't see the chinese company doing the same scheme at all.

        so, surely chinese AI providers also lost money making new models, but they are not spending nearly as much as US ones.

        • gruez 16 minutes ago

          >1. they still have revenue though. it might not enough to cover all the r&d but it is surely enough to cover the hardware cost.

          >2. people tend to ignore this, but the salary budget of a US frontier lab and chinese frontier lab is nowhere comparable, the first can easily outdone the later by 100x.

          Both arguments make it seem like there's a double standard for american vs chinese AI companies, where american labs are held up to strict standards for profitability, but chinese labs get a pass because [insert handwaving about how some aspect of chinese labs is different]. Let's do apples to apples comparisons here, what are both sides' run rates and revenue growth prospects?

          >3. us labs, like other US style startups, always throw ton of money to capture the market. I don't see the chinese company doing the same scheme at all.

          Right, instead they're releasing their models for free so competitors can undercut them on inference. American labs' prospect of "there are open models 90% as good but cost less" might seem bad, but chinese labs' prospect of "there are companies offering the exact same models but aren't on the hook for r&d spend" seems even worse.

        • applicative 24 minutes ago

          Literally nothing is known about how these companies are financed. The usual story is that Moonshot was chosen when 'Mythos' occasioned a huge state crisis. China is the ascended masters of insane amounts of capital poured into whatever the state takes into its head next.

      • m_ke an hour ago

        just like there were mistrals, coheres, llamas, etc, there will be new deepseeks and moonshots if those ever flame out (worst case, given out at cost by google, meta, alibaba or etc)

        OpenAI and Anthropic are already in a ~200bil hole from previous model iterations and are committing to trillions of additional spending

        OpenAI spent more TBPN than kimi spent on training K3

      • WarmWash an hour ago

        They are owned by the state, so the economics are a bit different.

        • gruez 38 minutes ago

          >They are owned by the state

          They are by all accounts, not. Z.ai for instance is a public company according to wikipedia. Moonshot AI is private but all their investors are private companies. Alibaba, as we all know, is a massive publicly traded tech conglomerate.

          Moreover even if we take the more charitable view that they're controlled by the CCP, and therefore will continue releasing models for free, that seems as questionable as the prospect that private investors will continue shoveling money into anthropic/openai.

          • WarmWash 27 minutes ago

            China has "classroom game capitalism", where companies can play the game, but the teacher still has uncontested, absolute, unilateral control in everything and anything. All the parameters of the game are managed by the teacher, and the teacher is the one who creates the foundations for the direction they want the game to move in.

            Don't forget, Jack Ma of "publicly owned" Alibaba, had to go into classroom time out after seemingly forgetting that its classroom capitalism and not real world capitalism.

      • epolanski an hour ago

        At a fraction of the cost.

        • gruez 42 minutes ago

          Shoveling 70% less money into a money pit is still shoveling money into a money pit. Not to mention that at least openai/anthropic has better prospects of making back the money because their models are proprietary, and won't be cannibalized by other companies serving the exact same models.

    • Haven880 2 hours ago

      Socialize the lost.They dont have to. You pay.

    • applicative 27 minutes ago

      Its more Google Amazon Meta Microsoft who are spending trillions. They will be fine. So will Anthropic and OpenAI. Nvidia will presumably survive. The losses are all the real estate interests and contractors and contributory hardware companies etc.

    • yogthos an hour ago

      I expect they're going to fight each other to become the vendor of record for the government, and whoever wins will get bailed out. This is one area where they don't have to worry about competition from Chinese models.

    • vrganj 2 hours ago

      Why do you think tech oligarchs have been cozying up to the Trump admin? They're angling for a government bailout, paid for by your tax money!

      • ptdcc 2 hours ago

        Thy cozy up to whoever is in government. They cozy'd up with Biden too.

        • Forgeties79 an hour ago

          I think most of us can see that the level of corruption we are seeing with the administration is quite historical. You can’t simply say “both administrations engaged in corruption” and consider the matter closed. Scale matters.

        • vrganj 2 hours ago

          That's true. But it's been a while since an admin was as brazenly corrupt and the cozying up was so promising.

  • AnodicElegy 2 hours ago

    Impressive. It kicked everything between itself and Sol xhigh out of the Pareto frontier. Can't wait to try it out.

  • jhack an hour ago

    Better than the latest Deepseek v4 Pro while being 3x cheaper in cost per task. Impressive!

  • a012 2 hours ago

    Can’t wait to try this out, and the only missing from this model for me is Image input support

    • minimaxir an hour ago

      It has image/video input support (that is surprisingly good)

  • croemer an hour ago

    Why does the top card say "Intelligence #1/173" when the bar chart further down shows it only at position 7?

    And the model isn't even shown in the speed bar chart just below. Such slop (the artificial intelligence website linked)

    • kzrdude 30 minutes ago

      Not clear to me how it selects that, but it considers it to be #1 out of 173 models "of the same class".

      • croemer 10 minutes ago

        I see, thanks, then it should state that in the card.