Z.ai
The biggest story in this Artifacts is GLM-5.2, which we have covered in a separate blog as well. The model continues to impress and is genuinely usable for everyday work, not a huge regression compared to the best closed models available right now. Interestingly enough, the raw download numbers since release are more in line with other model releases, with GLM-5.2 being roughly in line with GLM-5 after release.
An update to GLM-5, improving scores across the board. The focus for this update is on long-horizon tasks.
A 744B-A40B release from the Zhipu team, which has resulted in such a big increase in demand that they raised prices for their coding plan. It also comes with an accompanying tech report.
Another OCR model, this time from zAI. These tend to be used as data engines, mostly for pretraining, converting large swaths of PDFs to tokens.
A smaller version of GLM-4.7 which comes in the same size as the small Qwen3 MoE with 30B total, 3B active parameters.
An image generation model by Zhipu, which was trained on Huawei Ascend Chips. This is one of the first notable models trained entirely on China's nascent chip industry - we'll keep watching this trend emerge.
Zhipu, which will IPO on January 8th, dropped a really capable model just before Christmas with 4.7. GLM-4.7 is not close to (API model) SOTA performance on the usual academic benchmarks like GPQA or SWE-bench Verified, but manages to hold its performance beyond that in a broader suite of tasks like GPVal-AA or DesignArena. I (Florian) have tested this model extensively the last days by using the Z.ai API (and the corresponding coding subscription at $28/yr) in the OpenCode as the CLI (which also offers the model for free at the time of writing) and was more than impressed by the quality of this model. In certain areas (especially in UI generation for websites), I preferred its outputs over Opus, while in other areas, it was more or less on the level of Sonnet 4.5, which was released a mere 4 months ago. However, the model is quite slow (the cheapest coding plan is slower compared to their other offerings) and its long-context performance is worse than other closed models, especially after 100K tokens. Furthermore, it is text-only, which I "fixed" by adding Gemini 3.0 Flash as a subagent in OpenCode. But again, this is an open model, dirt cheap and self-hostable on a node of H100s!
An experimental model to control an Android phone.
This month, Zhipu also shipped an update to their vision model with support for function calling.
Zhipu has released an update to their main series of models. This release is notable because many people say that it's basically a Sonnet (or a Haiku) 4.5 at home, although it falls off (harder) at longer context than closed models. Still, a high praise and a continuation of the theme that Chinese open models improve at an astonishing rate, being close to the best closed models.
While Zhipu/Z.ai isn't exactly a newcomer to avid readers of Interconnects, the new GLM-4.5 model finally puts them into the well-deserved spotlight. Aside from LLMs, they also release a vision model, which, like many models, is a MoE-based model. The benchmark results are really impressive and are worth checking out.
The new LLM series by Zhipu/Z.ai comes in two sizes: 355B-A32 and 106B-A12. Furthermore, they also release the base models (which is rare these days!) and a detailed paper with some very nice RL experiments. Like their previous models, it is released under the MIT license.
An extension of zAI's GLM-9B-0414 to also support images as inputs. This is one of the longer-tail of very strong open weight model laboratories from China.
A model trained for (deep) research. It is trained by the team behind GLM and CogView, which has renamed itself to Z AI. The model can be accessed on their website to try them. This particular model is trained to search and click through websites with multiple function calls during its reasoning part.
A new version of GLM-04, trained on 15T tokens, including synthetic data generated by reasoning models.
An image-generation model released under Apache 2.0. The open-weight side of image generation models has been rather quiet lately, so this is a welcome addition. The model itself is really capable in generating good-looking images.
Open-source video model!
A really popular Chinese chat model I couldn't parse much from r/LocalLLaMA on.