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Posted by martinald 1 day ago

GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse(martinalderson.com)
660 points | 448 commentspage 5
a_c 11 hours ago|
Regarding the lack of vision part, if you are using Claude or opencode, I've made a skill[1] that let's you talk with any models in Claude/opencode mid-session. You ask "Have claude opus to look at this PDF for a second opinion" during a session of claude with GLM5.2 or opencode with GLM5.2

It doesn't need to pass whole conversation history as context (unlike /model), you can ask follow up to that forked model (which sub agents in claude doesn't support AFAIK), and you can ask models from opencode while using claude.

[1] https://github.com/kmcheung12/second-opinion

msephton 10 hours ago|
FWIW I've seen subagents remain open for followups on latest Claude.
a_c 6 hours ago||
Will give it a try thanks for the heads up. Mind if I ask if you are referring to SendMessage? I was testing on Claude code 2.1.196. SendMessage was not available. Skimming through their change log didn’t seem to have anything related to SendMessage. There is “ Fixed SendMessage silently misrouting when a re-spawned agent reuses a previous agent’s name — the tool now detects the mismatch and asks the caller to retarget” from 2.1.199. Not sure if they are related
msephton 2 hours ago||
I have no idea what things are called but somebody showed me how they could start a bunch of subagents and steer each with additional messages; some closed after their task was completed, but one stayed open for followups and continued working after being prompted by the main agent who was acting as triage.
yalogin 22 hours ago||
I don’t understand the argument here. The article doesn’t describe a collapse or the breadcrumbs for it. The only argument I can put together is companies hosting the open source models in house or use some service like Amazon that could potentially host them and so replace the frontier models. Data center and specifically infra to host llms is still the main sticking point given the security concerns about data going to china. The article doesn’t make these arguments coherently
pier25 7 hours ago||
Inference margin is irrelevant.

That’s like a gas station saying they have 90% margin over pumps but still losing money.

gnarbarian 22 hours ago||
the economics of this are a little counterintuitive.

is there a market saturation point for intelligence? how about for software? it seems like the more you have the more you want because you're trying to do more things.

as the models get smarter I get busier because I'm doing more things...

yogthos 22 hours ago|
There's definitely a saturation point depending on the complexity of the problem you're solving. For example, any model can write a small shell script to resize a video with ffmpeg for you right now, so it doesn't matter whether you're using a local Qwen model, GLM, or Fable. They'll all do a roughly comparable job and you'll end up with a working script that does what you need.

Then you have things like CRUD apps, where a model needs to write some SQL, make a service endpoint, serialize some JSON, etc. Here a local model might have a bit more trouble juggling all the pieces, but any hosted model will do just fine. If your day to day job involves working on CRUD apps, then it's basically a solved problem now.

The cases where frontier models matter are when you're solving genuinely complex problems, but that's not what most people are doing day to day. So, paying an order of magnitude for a model that has capabilities to solve problems outside the range of problems you actually work on becomes a waste of money.

There's going to be a market for these models from people who really do work on complex things on regular basis, but the question is how big that market is. Additionally, open models keep getting better, and GLM 6 or DeepSeek v5 could end up being another big jump in capability where they fully close the gap with Fable. At that point, even more of the market becomes covered by these models leaving truly complex cases on the frontier.

Another thing to consider is that most big problems can be broken down into smaller ones. That's the basis for how programming languages are structured. We have primitives which are arranged into functions, that get bundled into classes or namespaces, and so on. So, you don't need an infinitely capable model to solve big problems. You just need to be able to break large problems into smaller ones, and a model that's smart enough to decompose a problem to the point where it becomes tractable.

AgentMasterRace 20 hours ago||
I don't think the writer has used top tier models very much. I have subscriptions to basically every provider, the difference between glm5.2 and opus is not even close, the gap is huge. raw benchmarks glm is impressive , but in practice these models are lacking so much. I had fable create a detailed implementation guide that explained how to implement everything in immense detail, it included all the libraries to use and versions. I then had deepseek v4 pro execute and it used old versions , different libraries and cut corners. Fable said about 80% was implemented wrong.

I had GLM 5.2 do the same, and it performed exceptionally better, but when it got stuck on something it would be trial and error mode going forward and have zero foresight for future issues that might occur due to fixes it was trying. the model severally lacks prompt understanding, and testing .

vachina 17 hours ago|
Opus is good but not consistently good. That’s a problem. I’m paying the same but not getting the same results.
bluegatty 21 hours ago||
As long as the SOTA models are 'ahead' then there will be a big premium.
WhitneyLand 19 hours ago||
“Z.ai provides a replacement MCP for web search, but it's pretty awful and slow”

I’ve had good results with Tavily so far, might be worth checking as an alternative for agent search.

seydor 17 hours ago||
But what if they introduce a tarriff per token
LoganDark 1 day ago||
I hope cheaper inference eventually means faster speeds at the lower tiers. I don't want to settle for 100 t/s, but I don't want to pay $10 per prompt either
copperx 23 hours ago||
Which raises the question, which are the fastest frontier models? are the enterprise hosted Anthropic models faster than what Anthropic serves?

Somehow no one talks about LLM speed.

tough 23 hours ago|||
OAI has announced an upcoming 750tok/s 5.6 served through their cerebras acquisition
manquer 21 hours ago|||
> cerebras acquisition

Partnership you mean?, Cerebras went public and are trading at around 45B in market cap.

While OAI could in theory cough up that kind of money, it would massively hamper their existing committed capital outlays.

tough 2 hours ago||
Yes sorry, i got confused some how and mixed up the partnership announcement [1] with an acq one,

maybe i should get some cerebras stock then, ty for the pointer

1. https://openai.com/index/cerebras-partnership/

dcl 22 hours ago||||
That is going to be absolutely wild for whoever can access/afford it.
LoganDark 22 hours ago|||
Yeah, Cerebras is the one with competitive speeds nowadays but they cost an absolute fortune. Also they don't host good models publicly. Good to see OpenAI leaning into them, can't wait until these speeds are available by subscription
LoganDark 22 hours ago|||
> Somehow no one talks about LLM speed.

When I've raised speeds about local inference I've been told 60-75 t/s is perfectly usable. It makes sense that people aren't talking about speed yet since you either already have a response fast enough to wait for, or you go do something else and check back in a few minutes.

I would love to wait for the latter type of tasks though, because those are typically the ones that require the most work from me to verify and I don't want my attention divided with multitasking.

esafak 22 hours ago||
GLM 5.2 has a Fast variant at 200-400 tps.
redrix 22 hours ago|
The fact that these Chinese models are getting close to “Opus-grade” despite costing 6x-8x less is huge.

As the token bills start to come in, those economics will be harder to ignore (regardless of the origin of the LLM); especially as there will be many CIOs sweating over their quick and costly AI initiatives showing little ROI.

My hope is that the EU also steps up their own competition in the frontier model space so that it’s not just China v USA.

AgentMasterRace 20 hours ago|
they're not near opus at all, anyone using the models in a real working environment will tell you the same thing. on paper they have impressive benchmarks, but that's not realistic to actual use.
drbscl 14 hours ago|||
I think it depends on your use case. For my personal projects (a mix of webdev & some Rust desktop apps) it's honestly very close to Opus 4.8 (which I use in my day job).

I don't feel like I'm missing out after cancelling my personal Claude subscription, whereas I used to feel that way a few months ago.

shrinks99 16 hours ago|||
I've been using GLM 5.2 a lot this past week, it's been replacing Opus 4.8. I mostly do front-end web development and haven't noticed much of a quality difference.

Sure, "it's just frontend", but that's actual use enough for me to take it seriously.

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