GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse • Hacker News Board

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#431

Post by throwdbaaway » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

Roark66 wrote: post #369

throwdbaaway wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While we are all speculating, Boris kindly provided some guidance in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47880089 > The challenge is: when you let a session idle for >1 hour, when you come back to it and send a prompt, it will be a full cache miss, all N messages. We noticed that this corner case led to outsized token costs for users. In an extreme case, if you had 900k tokens in your context window, then idled for…

Recently I started getting messages from Clause Code (on a plan). "You're restoring an old session are you sure you don't want to compress the context? This will use a substantial amount of your usage quota" So it seems they do care.

That's exactly what I said. They do care when FLOPs are involved. Restoring an old session with 900k tokens will require a lot of FLOPs to reprocess the 900k token.

Meanwhile, they don't really care if you use hundreds of millions of cached input tokens, which doesn't consume any FLOP.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#432

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

klipt wrote: post #344

ben_w wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We first became powerful because we did the industrial revolution before anyone else, and used more of that capacity to fight the world (and win) than to fight each other. When we fought each other, after the industrial revolution, that was the Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars. > and ever since the creation of the EU it's been becoming less and less important on the world stage. I wouldn't say it was "ever sinc…

> the world's dominant power by virtue of having roughly half the total world population If human+ level AI takes off one would expect to see a great decoupling of power from population.

[deleted]

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#433

Post by forshaper » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #421

Lalabadie wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're applying US cultural logic to Chinese bureaucracy

China is an authoritarian state with a single leader who has unilateral uncontested control for life. China has no real bureaucracy (or any other structure for that matter) because at the end of the day, it's one guy who can do whatever he wants whenever he wants. For commoners and officials there is this faux bureaucracy, but for the elite at the top making decisions, there is zero. If Xi doesn't want models exporte…

More or less authoritarian than Imperial dynasties? Zhao Gao for Qin, Huang Hao for Shu Han, Yang Fugong for Tang, this list can just keep going.

The Ten Eunuchs, if you want one example. Which is to say, their bureaucracies have always worked with single leaders who ostensibly had unilateral uncontested control for life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Attendants

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#434

Post by mlboss » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

fny wrote: post #5

I'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…

To switch an LLM you just need to open another browser tab and type in your chat query. You cannot say the same for any other kind of software. Traditional software have a large switching cost which acts as a barrier.

LLM providers are like airlines. You only need when you have travel and most of the time you go for the cheapest one. Maybe LLM providers should start providing reward points :) .

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#435

Post by KronisLV » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

ryukoposting wrote: post #379

KronisLV wrote: post #3

They have a vision MCP to make up for the model itself not having the capability natively: https://docs.z.ai/devpack/mcp/vision-mcp-server I also found their web search to be mostly okay. Furthermore, in case this is of interest to anyone, if you use their ZCode harness then you get bigger Coding Plan quotas: https://zcode.z.ai/en Used it for a bit, it sits somewhere between OpenCode Desktop (still new but nice) and…

> Not even doing anything crazy, just parallel long form work on 2 projects... and at most 3 parallel code review sub-agents. I had to read this sentence twice.

> I had to read this sentence twice.

Heh, I mean I'm not running Gas Town: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d... so as far as AI stuff go, I'd assume that I'm not too much of an outlier.

Either way, wrote about my experiences with GLM Coding Subscription a bit more on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/z-ai-s-glm-5-2-is-a-great-model...

I do suspect that there's plenty of people who'd use way fewer tokens.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#436

Post by james2doyle » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

budsniffer952 wrote: post #4

> the least understood upcoming shift in AI economics. Then proceeds to talk about something in the AI news every day. Hey, did you guys hear? Open source models are cheaper and their quality is increasing! So, first, by no measure is GLM5.2 as good as Opus. Second, yes, open source models will put pressure on margins...eventually. Everyone knows that. But do you think today's AI business model is the same as tomorro…

What if your measure is cost? Or zero-data-retention? Or diversity of inference providers?

On those measures it is better.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#437

Post by mountainofdeath » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

History is littered with the corpses of companies that had exceptional but expensive products that were replaced with cheap, good enough products.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#438

Post by iknowstuff » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

bayarearefugee wrote: post #148

iknowstuff wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t exactly see orgs lining up to switch (and train) their employees between claude desktop and codex and whatever copilot is doing. There’s probably some inertia to those harnesses/integrations on top of the llms themselves.

What "training" do you have to do to get a professional developer to switch LLMs or harnesses? Its literally just download the other one, point it to your code base and start typing into that text box instead of the other one.

devs are the easiest, yeah.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#439

Post by mountainofdeath » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

fny wrote: post #5

I'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…

Raw cloud computing costs have a fairly small margin over what they could be. Nobody with real purchasing power is paying anywhere near the listed retail rates. It's part of the reason smaller providers e.g. OVH, can remain quite competitive.

The other items have very strong lock-in and capture ecosytems. Microsoft Office is the first and only office suite anyone uses and its cheap enough for nobody to consider a real alternative. Microsoft could attempt to charge $10,000 a seat and while some will certainly stay, others would look for an alternative. But for just $10 a month, its a fair price to pay.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#440

Post by throwa356262 » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

markasoftware wrote: post #405

throwa356262 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to deepseek themselves, their current rates are NOT subsidised. They have published tons of articles dedicated to performance and efficiency engineering. Feel free to have a look...

Why is no other inference provider offering similar prices then?

How long did it take vLLM to implement deepseeks sparse attention from the r1 paper?

Does ananyone outside deepseek have a working code for the v4 compressed attention mechanism?

Has any other provider managed to bypass CUDA and program the compute engines in their native assembly language to get 10% more performance out of them?

There is your answer.