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I signed up to a z.ai max account, $144. Hardly been able to use it as it 429s on most requests. They’re also refusing to refund me.
And when i can use it, it just drains the quota 5 times faster than codex or claude.
Their plan is a scam
I can't help wondering what kind of models we'll see coming out of China once it gets its own chip fabs up and running. Right now it sounds like the US's export ban is not slowing them down a whole lot.
Seems to me that going slow is the better long term tactic. China can just let the USA pay the high R&D costs to figure out what works, then just copy what works.
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I'm not sure how I'm supposed to get $200 of value out of personal use!
Here most of my colleagues have +200 dollar rates. It's really a no brainer. But sure, in south America or some Asian countries maybe it is. But still most devs need it anyway. Also in the poor regions.
GLM-5.2 has been a step change in how fast i can burn through tokens. I subscribed to their max plan to try it out. It counted me 700M tokens and drained my weekly quota in under 2 days. Quota just reset less than 24h ago and i'm already >60% weekly quota usage. For reference the kind of work i did would have used somewhere between 3% and 5% of Codex max or Claude max. The model is good, the plan is a scam
If it is needing to generate that many tokens to do the same tasks, then it probably has higher inference costs. So (for you) the model is bad, the plan is the same plan.
Open weight models from Chinese labs tend to be significantly cheaper. I think theyre absolutely needed. I can't afford 200 USD a month for personal use of coding AI, and I don't think such prices are reasonable for most of the world economy anyway. Not to mention US firms might be giving their employees a lot more than that. It's increasingly feeling, to me, that theres a gap building up between haves and have nots.…
If we can agree that the AI model is at least as capable as a junior engineer or new contractor, how’s that different to saying “software engineering isn’t worth $200 a month”? Has a very race-to-the-bottom feel to it. Though in the grand scheme of it, $200/mo probably isn’t the real price either. Also looking at it not just in a vacuum - paying for a product that can change what you get from under you doesn’t seem g…
Is 2 better than x.ai
I just tested GLM 5.2 out via Z.ai in pi for a little one-off project that was already scoped. It actually did a relatively decent job starting out, and figured important things out from context. But the reasoning traces became increasingly hilarious, with it getting confused and going in loops, doubting itself. I began to feel almost sad, it was like listening to the internal monologue of someone with anxiety disord…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the self-doubt might actually be a very crucial part of it's capability. I often feel compelled to interrupt when I'm watching it think (which thank the stars it let's us do, unlike the big American models!!), but usually it makes the right pick! Being willing and able to reconsider seems very good. Going around and around, pulling in more thinking, integrating it: maybe that's why it is as good as it's good.…
Your post made me laugh because I experienced the same as you but the other way around. I switched from Claude to a multi model harness a couple of days ago and the first model I tried was GLM5.2. I gave it some simple code porting exercises and watched dumbfounded at the reasoning, which was more like the ravings of a lunatic - but lo and behold, after much confusion and a dizzying number of eureka moments the task…
Consider debugging - you start off in one place, think you have worked out what is happening, and then there is a "oh but what about xxx" thing that happens and you explore another branch. Then you "have it for sure" until you find another edge case.
The LLM is doing something analogous. It's writing circuits to try to emulate your program. Each time it gets one that seems right it is very sure that circuit is correct, but then it finds another thing.
At any point you can stop and go "write code now" and it will, and the code will seems fine provided it hasn't hit one of these edge cases.
Turning up thinking time is literally forcing more exploration.
The words that come out are amusingly dramatic, but... TBH when I debug I often are like "WTF" and throwing my hands up in the air at some gotcha I didn't expect.
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200 is much less than the value you’re supposed to get out of it. If it’s not then yeah go ahead and use cheaper models with worst quality
Are you aware of how much purchasing power 200 dollars is in china, brazil, thailand or india is? This is an extremely arrogant take.