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Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new GLM-series model and will release its weights

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Re: Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new GLM-series model and will release its weights

#51
post #47

Releasing weights is the right move. Keeps them competitive with DeepSeek on the open side.

I had good experience with GLM 5.3, but... Z.AI is the only provider for GLM 5.3 on OpenRouter. I don't see 5.3 on Hugging Face. Not sure if this new model is "full GLM" or something smaller, or if they will like Moonshot AI publish weights but put restrictive license [1], which will again leave Z.AI as single GLM model provider on OpenRouter. [1] https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3/blob/main/LICENSE

GLM 5.3 weights are not yet released

Re: Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new GLM-series model and will release its weights

#53
post #49

> The company on Wednesday confirmed speculation that the Ox Alpha model is a new iteration of its GLM series and said it will release the weights for it tonight, in response to queries by Bloomberg News. Where? And "Tonight" in which timezone?

Singapore I would assume. Z.ai usually peg everything to Singapore time.

Re: Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new GLM-series model and will release its weights

#54
post #6

I'd be interested to know what was going on with it during the public test as there were numerous reports of it improving considerably at tasks it was asked to do early on in the test compared to later in it.

It's logical to serve the best version (quant) of the model at the beginning so that users keep testing it. It is also reasonable to think that the developer of the model tried to test various quant levels by gradually degrading the model's capabilities.

I mean that’s imaginative but not sure there’s any evidence at all for it, and it’s the opposite of what the comment you replied to observed.

Re: Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new GLM-series model and will release its weights

#55
post #7
post #4

Anyone has a link to a report of its capabilities? I can't find a reliable source.

completely vibes based, but ive been using it to port Mindustry game from Java to C# with agents, and its been working for 50 hours (its 15-20 tks so super slow inference). Its done a fantastic work and its almost finished now. Better results than deepseek flash and gpt luna by a mile on this kind of long term work. Less good than gpt sol or opus. We dont know the param count but my guess is 200-300 range.

Just curious, what is the motivation for this conversion?

Re: Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new GLM-series model and will release its weights

#56
post #49

> The company on Wednesday confirmed speculation that the Ox Alpha model is a new iteration of its GLM series and said it will release the weights for it tonight, in response to queries by Bloomberg News. Where? And "Tonight" in which timezone?

China is GMT+8

Re: Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new GLM-series model and will release its weights

#57
Rather than a pelican, for fun I showed it a couple of screenshots from Niu Lai and asked it to create an SVG inspired by the images. I explained a little about how the movie had been made by a mother & son team, initially derided but then went on to surprise cult box office success. It came up with this:

https://x.com/syneryder/status/2091978367579156569/photo/1

Created in a single turn - but technically not a "one-shot", because I gave it a tool to convert SVG to PNG so it could visualize what it had made. I asked it to keep iterating with tools during the same turn until it was happy.

I've also been using Ox Alpha for tasks that better resemble real work, and I'm really enjoying working with it. I've downgraded my Anthropic account so I can put some budget towards Ox Alpha instead, with the rumors that this one is going to be cheap. Opus & Fable are still better at getting large tasks / features done autonomously, but Ox Alpha can work autonomously too, and it's fun. I'm enjoying working with Ox in a way that I'm just not enjoying talking to the 5.0 Anthropic models. (As much as I don't want to say that, as someone with Claude /stickers on their laptop.)

Re: Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new GLM-series model and will release its weights

#58
post #37

There's a lot of brand confusion among the Chinese models right now. Kimi, Qwen, GLM, Z.ai, Ox. We might know the difference (or I should say, someone does because I'm losing track already) but these models have no chance at end user penetration and loyalty until there's a single focused survivor. It took me a year talking about it until my wife knew that ChatGPT and Gemini are two different things. PS: some replies,…

I have seen studies from MIT and Stanford that the majority or US startups are using much less expensive open weight models so consumers of their products are open model users whether they know it or not. These are often Chinese models.

Not to go off topic but I am pleased to see open model support from US companies like Poolside.ai, NVIDIA, IBM, Google, etc.

Re: Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new GLM-series model and will release its weights

#59
I had Ox Alpha working on coding tasks for a couple days non-stop, via OpenRouter and OpenCode Zen. Crush harness. It was able to complete tasks at a level that I'd put between Sonnet and Opus. It makes few mistakes, but is not that smart.

The main issue for me, is that it degraded into a doom loop several times. One of them was running the same bash command about a thousand times. The last model I've used that had this problem was Mimo 2.5, which is quite dated at this point. As a result of this, you cannot leave it unattended / not usable for agents.

Re: Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new GLM-series model and will release its weights

#60

Mixed signals, here it's performing below even GPT-5.4 Nano: https://livebench.ai/ while here it outperforms Fable by a significant margin: https://oxalpha.com/ but if the latter is true, will people still say it was "distilled" from Fable?

I really want to see hard evidence of distillation before I buy into it. Seems like a lot of sour grapes over not having the sort of lead assumed. In this field, it has been shown repeatedly that leaps in performance come swiftly and without notice.

FWIW, the way GLM-5.2 (and 5.3) talk is clearly claude, so it is for sure also trained using distillation.

The metric used there is me screaming at my screen per operating hours.

Does it matter? IMO not really. Weights are open after all. (Or.. soon at least for 5.3)

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