GLM 5.2 vs. Opus - Hacker News

Posted by ritzaco 17 hours ago

477 points | 314 commentspage 5

bornfreddy 8 hours ago|

I know that running this locally is prohibitively expensive (for now), but what kind of cost would I be looking at if I wanted to rent the hardware and run the model by myself?

samsin 11 hours ago||

My understanding was that n-shot prompting just referred to the number of examples included in a prompt, not the number of prompts to achieve the desired result.

"Build a 3D platformer game from scratch, in raw WebGL, with no game engine or 3D library" would be a zero-shot prompt.

jofzar 16 hours ago||

Great article,

My only, I guess feedback, is that it's not really clear about the price.

Would the 21.92 be the API pricing I guess?

Cost $5.39 (real billed) ~$21.92 (estimate, list pricing)

poulpy123 14 hours ago||

What would the best way to use these open source models for a price similar to what I could pay for the cheapest plan with claude and openai ?

I would like to give them a try but I certainly not have the money to get a system able to run them, and I don't really want to pay more than the state of the art

IronWolve 17 hours ago||

Having issues with coding a render for good looking realistic smoke coming off burning incense, opus 4.8 & gpt-5.5 both have code issues, glm-5.2 did it. Amazing.

The real time 3d fluid dynamics appear to be the tricky part, I wish I still had opus access, would love to see if it can do it.

stavros 13 hours ago|

You mean Fable?

wejick 16 hours ago||

Totally agree witg the general assessment. The biggest problem with Z.ai model for a long time is not quality, but the inference speed and general capacity availability. Hopefully with this recent hype, there will be more provider on openrouter for 5.2.

orloffm 11 hours ago||

> 256 GiB unified RAM.

So, 8000$, plus it's unavailable. 3 years of Codex/Opus subscription.

> API prices

Which are irrelevant for 200$ Codex/Opus plans that are times cheaper.

maccard 12 hours ago||

Are these games supposed to be a good example of quality output? If this is the product, I don't really want to play _either_ of them.

close2 16 hours ago|

I wonder how much tokens and time where used for the verifying part. Maybe GLM 5.2 instantly found the "solution" to read the screen pixel by pixel, but it could also have been a major token and time consumer.

jameswhitford 15 hours ago||

Hi, author here, I cannot give an exact number for how many token the verification step took, but the verification GLM 5.2 ran was very stupid and definitely a waste of time. It read the pixel color data to try and verify the scene rendered properly. Which is really bad. Opus opened the game in a Playwright browser and took screenshots to verify the actual image. Which helped a lot.

Pro tip: You could use a multi-modal model to verify images as a subagent spawned by GLM 5.2, to get around this issue.

59nadir 7 hours ago||

That's a dumb way to do it, it should just write the frame buffer to a PNG instead of taking screenshots. I guess you can't take the dumb web developer ways out of these models at the end of the day.

trick-or-treat 16 hours ago||

I could be wrong but I believe this is a non-vision model. Please weigh in to correct me bc I would love to be wrong

jameswhitford 15 hours ago||

GLM 5.2 is text only, not multi modal. And Opus is multi modal.

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