GLM-5.2 Is The New Best Open Model - by Zvi Mowshowitz

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GLM-5.2 Is The New Best Open Model

Zvi Mowshowitz<br>Jun 22, 2026

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GLM-5.2 arrived last week. It boasts excellent benchmarks and looks strong.<br>Benchmarks here are a de facto ceiling of how good it is, not a point estimate. Essentially all other aspects of an open model like this, beyond speed and price, will almost always be worse than the numbers suggest. Still, impressive.<br>It is definitely a large step up from GLM-5.1, and likely the strongest open model.<br>GLM-5.2 is still substantially behind the absolute frontier, although plausibly on the cost-benefit Pareto frontier. It seems closer to the frontier than previous efforts, including probably closer than DeepSeek R1 was during the DeepSeek moment.<br>This is the new ‘peak close behind’ moment. Its existence is a substantial updates to push back some of the ‘where are all the updates’ updates in the opposite direction over time.<br>Purely in terms of core tasks that GLM-5.2 is capable of doing, and ignoring missing features and its inferior generalization, and ignoring that it is distilled from Claude, and ignoring the Mythos class of models, and marking purely from date of public release, you can make a case GLM-5.2 is somewhere between 4 months and 7 months behind the frontier, at a lower price.<br>That does not mean it is all that useful in practice. Finding its niche is tricky unless you inherently value openness. It is not cheap enough, or better enough than cheaper alternatives, for the true bulk tasks, nor strong enough for the strongest tasks. There are various practical difficulties, including lack of vision.<br>This post gives GLM-5.2 the full capabilities post treatment.<br>But first, a word for our favorite Congressional candidate, whose election is tomorrow.<br>Alex Bores For Congress In NY-12

In the strongest terms, this blog enthusiastically endorses democrat Alex Bores in his congressional primary in my home district, NY-12.<br>Alex Bores has been a champion of sensible AI regulation in the New York Assembly, including championing the RAISE Act, and fighting to keep its provisions intact against strong opposition, risking great political capital.<br>He understands and I believe primarily cares about AI existential risk. He does discuss other AI issues as well, as this is good politics and the other issues he discusses are real concerns, but what matters is the frontier.<br>If he is elected to Congress, he will be a champion of sensible federal AI frontier model regulation. Having a champion in Congress willing to stake their political capital and time is vital to getting things done. He will also bring the knowledge and technical chops necessary to move this forward.<br>This election is also an opportunity to send a message. OpenAI and a16z’s Leading the Future declared Alex Bores their primary target. Him losing is a potential chilling effect for other candidates and could help cower others into not ‘taking on’ OpenAI or advocating for AI regulation. Him winning (this is a very safe district, whoever wins the primary will win the general election) would do the opposite, and indicate that we can stand against such matters.<br>If you live in the district and will be voting tomorrow, or otherwise could potentially assist, and want to chat with someone about this, you can fill out this form.<br>Ok, that’s over with. On to GLM-5.2.<br>Signs of Life

Teortaxes: hey @TheZvi , if I may GLM is the strongest Chinese lab (at this specific moment) and this really is a frontier model. It is ≈Opus 4.7 in almost all text-only ways. Is reduces the gap more than R1 did at its time. Do pay attention, we don’t want to repeat the same mistakes do we.<br>Teortaxes (DeepSeek 推特铁粉 2023 – ∞): GLM is the first time I see a Chinese agent capable of actually doing the /goal thing. It CAN work for hours, it can just keep obsessively optimizing. I get that Xiaomi/Kimi/Qwen/MInimax nominally have it too. But it has never felt so solid.<br>one nitpick: permission hell in Zcode<br>amendment, you can just go YOLO actually<br>but the default “edit automatically” mode is too restrictive, eg it can’t use puppeteer<br>[his ‘oh shit’ moment was it doing well on CritPt where it matched Opus 4.8 and trailing only high effort settings on top frontier models.]

Teortaxes suggesting GLM-5.2 might be something, and he’s reasonably restrained with such suggestions, so I did a reaction thread and investigated.<br>What did we find?<br>The Benchmarks

The benchmarks are remarkably close to frontier level.<br>Artificial Analysis v4.1 has GLM-5.2 at a damn impressive (for open models) 51, behind only Fable (60), Opus 4.8 (56), GPT-5.5 (55) and Opus 4.7 (54), and tied with GPT-5.4.<br>They have it at 95 in the speed index, the same as GLM-5.1, just behind DeepSeek v4. Gemini Flash 3.5 is faster at 116, but all the clearly better models are at least somewhat slower, GPT-5.5-xhigh gets 63 and Opus 4.8 scores 58.<br>Cost is lower than the big closed...