China's Leading AI Model: Is GLM-4.5 Its Most Powerful Agent Yet?
In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, Z.ai has made a significant move with the release of its GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air models. These next-generation AI models are designed to compete favorably with Western counterparts such as OpenAI's models and Elon Musk's Grok.
The GLM-4.5 model boasts a large-scale parameter count of 355B, with 32B active, and employs a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) hybrid thinking architecture. This design allows for a balance between speed and complexity, making it competitive with leading AI models like o3 and Grok 4 in many key aspects.
On the other hand, GLM-4.5 Air is a streamlined version optimized for efficiency and speed. It uses a MoE approach to activate fewer parameters (12B active), while maintaining high-quality output, and sports sub-second response times. This version requires only 16GB GPU memory, making it accessible for moderate hardware resources.
In comparison, OpenAI's models, such as GPT-4 and the upcoming GPT-5, are estimated to have larger parameter counts. However, they remain closed source, with heavy infrastructure requirements. The upcoming GPT-5 is expected to offer a leap forward in integrated reasoning and coding, but it may also be more resource-intensive.
Musk's Grok 4, while competitive, trails GLM-4.5 in agentic performance benchmarks and lacks the open-source availability and efficiency optimizations that Z.ai offers.
In terms of performance, GLM-4.5 excels in reasoning, coding, and tool use. It has been claimed to beat Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 4 on benchmarks. GLM-4.5 Air, on the other hand, is optimized for efficiency and speed, excelling in code and web browsing tasks.
The GLM-4.5 series represents a significant advance from Chinese AI companies. They push open-source model capabilities closer to—and in some respects outperforming—Western proprietary models, especially in agentic tasks, practical coding use, and deployment efficiency. They offer a strong, cost-effective alternative to OpenAI and Grok while contributing to a more open AI ecosystem.
The GLM-4.5 model family has demonstrated its capabilities in various tests, including solving complex problems such as the four-person square dilemma and a math and physics problem from the JEE preparation. Sarthak Dogra, a technical content strategist and communicator with a decade of experience, has been instrumental in communicating the performance of these models.
Z.ai is also building an ecosystem, complete with RL infrastructure like slime, and the GLM 4.5 family is a stepping stone toward sovereign AI stacks.
In conclusion, the GLM-4.5 series is a promising development in the AI landscape, offering a competitive alternative to leading Western AI models. Its open-source nature, cost-effectiveness, and focus on agentic and coding tasks make it an attractive option for many.
The technology behind Z.ai's GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air models utilizes artificial-intelligence, making strides to compete favorably with Western AI models like OpenAI's and Elon Musk's Grok. The GLM-4.5 model, in particular, employs a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) hybrid thinking architecture to balance speed and complexity, while GLM-4.5 Air optimizes for efficiency and speed, using a MoE approach to maintain high-quality output with lower resource requirements.
