A Chinese giant just unleashed a 744B-param beast that’s open for devs to grab - is this the GPT-killer we’ve been waiting for?
Imagine training on 28.5 trillion tokens and activating just 40B at inference - that’s the efficiency hack dropping today that could slash your AI bills overnight.
Z.ai released GLM-5 yesterday, a colossal 744 billion parameter model (with 40B active) pre-trained on a mind-boggling 28.5T tokens. It’s the latest in their GLM series, fully open-weights and ready for download. This isn’t hype - it’s a tangible upgrade pushing boundaries in scale while keeping compute sane via smart activation[1].
For developers, this matters because GLM-5 targets real-world tasks like coding, reasoning, and multilingual work where closed models dominate. If you’re building agents or fine-tuning for production, those massive params mean better generalization without the vendor lock-in of GPT or Claude. Early benchmarks suggest it holds its own against leaders, especially in non-English scenarios[1].
Compare to DeepSeek’s Math-V2 (also recent open release at 685B), GLM-5 emphasizes broad capabilities over math specialization. Against proprietary giants like GPT-5.2, it’s free to run locally or on your cloud, dodging API costs and rate limits. The ecosystem? Chinese labs like Z.ai and DeepSeek are flooding Hugging Face with SOTA open models, forcing Big Tech to open up or get left behind[1].
Grab it from z.ai or HF today - fine-tune on your dataset, plug into LangChain, and benchmark against your stack. Watch for community evals: will it crush on HumanEval or MMLU? Your next side project just got a free supercharger.
Source: dentro.de/ai