GLM is the model that will sink the frontier labs. Recall last year deepseek? And 18 month's later? What changed?
A year ago I wasn't using Deepseek. Now I am. I guess what changed is which models people are using most for coding.
GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
111–120 of 495 posts
Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unlike all your examples, switching out an LLM is both cheap an easy. So easy that every 3 months or so new models are released and people grab them and start using them. The UX is the same regardless the provider. You send in a prompt, it spits back an answer. In all your other cases, the cost to switch is losing support and a difficult transition period. But in the case of LLMs, there was no support to begin with.…
Hard disagree. Two LLMs with the same numbers on important benchmarks could have vastly different behavior in actual deployment. Not sure if as hard to switch as Excel Libre but still not "cheap and easy".
This is just another example of the bitter lesson. In a year a model will come out that will make none of these model specific optimizations you made matter.
Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
#113> Where it gets really scary for the frontier labs is how easy it is to migrate to open weights models. Both Z.ai and Fireworks offer both an OpenAI compatible and Anthropic compatible endpoint. This makes it absolutely trivial to use with Claude Code and Codex.
Yes the ease of switching is greatly appreciated.
Now the reason I tolerate Claude Code in my tmux sessions is because apparently Anthropic ain't playing nice with the subscription plans and other harnesses.
But I'm evaluating pi.dev atm and it looks amazing. To me being able to rid of that piece of vibe-coded underperforming, characters-modifying, turd that Claude Code is a big motivation to switch to GLM (I'll probably keep my OpenAI subscription as OpenAI repeatedly said they were cool with other harnesses).
It's also quite obvious that Claude Code is receiving new vibe-coded slop features after vibe-coded slop features in an attempt to lock you in.
To anyone thinking about switching to GLM: I'd say at least evaluate pi.dev and see if that wouldn't be an opportunity to kiss Claude Code and its "gameloop that converts characters from a headless browser to other characters to show in a terminal at 60 fps" goodbye once and for all.
Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
#114I'm not convinced raw costs matter: 1. Compute costs collapsed since the advent of Cloud and yet hyperscalers still have fat margins. 2. Many open source office suites exist yet none compete with the ubiquity of gsuite or office. GitHub, Slack are similar examples. 3. Both Windows and macOS dominate the home desktop space despite free alternatives existing for a long time. 4. Many formerly open source infrastructure…
Unlike all your examples, switching out an LLM is both cheap an easy. So easy that every 3 months or so new models are released and people grab them and start using them. The UX is the same regardless the provider. You send in a prompt, it spits back an answer. In all your other cases, the cost to switch is losing support and a difficult transition period. But in the case of LLMs, there was no support to begin with.…
> So easy that every 3 months or so new models are released and people grab them and start using them
Individuals perhaps, but not organizations.
Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
#115I'm not convinced raw costs matter: 1. Compute costs collapsed since the advent of Cloud and yet hyperscalers still have fat margins. 2. Many open source office suites exist yet none compete with the ubiquity of gsuite or office. GitHub, Slack are similar examples. 3. Both Windows and macOS dominate the home desktop space despite free alternatives existing for a long time. 4. Many formerly open source infrastructure…
There's a huge case of survivorship bias when trying to recall historical analogues, because in every instance where margins collapsed and competition made the industry a commodity business, the big proprietary names are no longer with us. Here's a selection of examples, though:
1. Memory chip margins collapsed so much in the 80s that Intel exited the memory chip business entirely. At the time, they were known much more as a memory chip company than a microprocessor company.
2. Margins for high-end workstations collapsed in the face of cheaper IBM PC clones and an explosion of MS Windows software. This led directly to the deaths of SGI, Sun, Symbolics, Lucid, LMI, etc.
3. Proprietary UNIX variants like HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, and SCO Unix have basically completely died out, replaced by lower-cost proprietary OSes like Windows and MacOS, or by open-source descendants of Linux and BSD.
4. Many commercial database vendors like Oracle, dBase, Sybase, FoxPro, and Microsoft (SQL Server and Access) found themselves very much under margin pressure from PostGres, MySQL, and SQLite. Oracle survived thanks to their massive installed base and legal department, and Microsoft survived because they could cross-subsidize from their OS and Office monopolies, but dBase, Sybase, and FoxPro are no longer with us.
Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
#116I'm not convinced raw costs matter: 1. Compute costs collapsed since the advent of Cloud and yet hyperscalers still have fat margins. 2. Many open source office suites exist yet none compete with the ubiquity of gsuite or office. GitHub, Slack are similar examples. 3. Both Windows and macOS dominate the home desktop space despite free alternatives existing for a long time. 4. Many formerly open source infrastructure…
There's a huge case of survivorship bias when trying to recall historical analogues, because in every instance where margins collapsed and competition made the industry a commodity business, the big proprietary names are no longer with us. Here's a selection of examples, though: 1. Memory chip margins collapsed so much in the 80s that Intel exited the memory chip business entirely. At the time, they were known much m…
second this. great analysis
Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
#117“Z.ai provides a replacement MCP for web search, but it's pretty awful and slow”
I’ve had good results with Tavily so far, might be worth checking as an alternative for agent search.
Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
#118Metaphor i like is that it will be as cheap as electricty?
Do you know who is supplying your electricity or which factory it runs on? probably no, bc its a commodity and mostly settled and there is so many energy resources. some are alternative some are coal mines. And they all fight in the supply demand trade for energy which is happening real time ( think open router here)
And eventually the consumer wins bc of the abundance.
I think greatest example of abundance of cheap infinite intelligence will be not glm5.2 but DeepSeek V4 Pro max with $0.435 per 1M input tokens and $0.87 per 1M output tokens
Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
>switching out an LLM is both cheap an easy. Honestly, these days probably less friction switching out Redis or Elasticsearch (backend) than changing LLM provider (human facing). Fable is seriously good enough now to, in a 20k line project, take "replace Mongoengine with raw PyMongo" and not screw anything up.
Agents will make all of these migrations trivial. I expect margin collapse across a lot of tech darlings.
This is the conversation I plan to have with Okta sales soon. Wait till you see how easy AI makes it to switch to Entra ID or anyone else. It’s tedium not even problem solving.
Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So, first, by no measure is GLM5.2 as good as Opus. Depends what you do. Complex tasks, poorly-defined tasks, sure. For relatively simple tasks, though, or very well-defined tasks, it's just as good and usually a lot faster. It also has a more neutral character and is somewhat less adversarial than Opus. (Opus is always "Let me push back on that..." whereas GLM is "sir, yes sir!") I use both and I appreciate both.…
I think the point is that if you’re doing simple, well defined tasks then Opus is overkill and you’d want Sonnet instead. Meaning, GLM5.2 is Sonnet-quality, not Opus-quality.
I think it's interesting to note that in one year we've gone from they're not even close [0] to arguing whether open models are only as good as sonnet or opus.