[unrvl22]

Why aren't more people talking about this? It's literally Opus 4.7 quality stupid prices. I know providers who are offering this at unlimited tokens for $50 a month. Some are even offering API rates at 3x lower than the official ZAI api rates which are already like 10x cheaper than Opus. (Crof and Umans btw)

This is a huge blow to Anthropic/OpenAI/Google and a massive win for the rest of the world. The official API prices and speeds mean nothing for open source models.

[stanac]

> Some are even offering API rates at 3x lower than the official ZAI api rates

Looking at openrouter [1], some of the cheaper offerings are for quantized models. Not sure how much intelligence is lost in quantization. And they are not 3 times cheaper. Where did you find 3x lower prices for APIs? I am considering skipping open router and using them directly for that price.

edit:

I see, croft [2] 8bit for $0.50/$0.08/$2.20

[1]: https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.2

[2]: https://ai.nahcrof.com/pricing

[scrlk]

IME, unquantised -> FP8 is pretty much lossless. What matters more is having an unquantized KV cache - using an FP8 KV cache can result in a significant drop in quality.

[johnnyApplePRNG]

>unquantised -> FP8 is pretty much lossless

Claude Shannon is rolling in his grave.

[ComputerGuru]

Do infra providers reveal that level of implementation detail?

[scrlk]

I've seen a few articles from providers talking about KV cache quantisation, but it's not something they explicitly point out like they do with weights.

So you could end up paying more for unquantised weights, only to get silently hit with a quantised KV cache...

[benjiro29]

Neuralwatt ... When you reverse calculate the actual energy usage / price on a token basis, the gap is large.

I do not have GLM 5.2 numbers because the whole default max setting is overkill. But GLM 5.1 numbers had it at 12x cheaper then API rates. And about 2.5x more tokens vs zai their own subscription service.

Yes, its FP8 but lets be honest, do we know for sure that even zai runs at FP16? I learned a long time ago with Claude and Codex how much cheating happens on model levels, even from the big boys.

[CuriouslyC]

Be careful about unofficial providers, a lot of them misconfigure models or stealth quantize them. For a while the difference between Kimi on the official API and most third party providers was 20-40%.

[thehamkercat]

Kimi K2 had a vendor verifier: https://github.com/MoonshotAI/K2-Vendor-Verifier

(there's a table which shows comparison between vendors)

Also, it seems there's a general one as well (for all kimi models?): https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-Vendor-Verifier

[cedws]

OpenRouter should be penalising or banning for this.

[kilroy123]

This is my biggest complaint about OpenRouter and I'm a fan. Might be pretty tough at scale?

[orbital-decay]

They have an "exacto" category with providers they supposedly verified

[ComputerGuru]

That’s only for tool use.

[alecco]

Would that align with their VC-backed incentives?

[unrvl22]

the 2 I mentioned both have a fairly large following, who run benchmarks and absolutely will spot issues.

[Schiendelman]

To answer the question in your first sentence - because it's VERY computationally (ha) expensive as a human being to keep up with all the options. It's also very hard to figure out how to run a model like this. There's no installer. If you really really care, which 99% of people do not, you have to google a guide, and then find out it's out of date...

I've tried a number of these, and the learning curve is very steep compared to "install Claude Code and pay $100/mo". There is no way saving me $50/month matters compared to figuring that out.

[andai]

But it just works with Claude Code? They have a guide on their website.

https://docs.z.ai/devpack/tool/claude

Here's my setup. I add this to my .bashrc

export ZAI_API_KEY="your_key_here"

alias claudez='ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN="$ZAI_API_KEY" ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="https://api.z.ai/api/anthropic" ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL="glm-5.2[1m]" ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL="glm-4.7" ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL="glm-4.7" claude'

Then I just run claudez

pro tip the same thing works with deepseek https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/anthropic_api

Even more pro tip: Claude Code can set this up for you haha

[Schiendelman]

Sure, I'm not saying I, a software engineer, cannot do this. I'm saying it's significant onboarding friction.

Unless this were a massive differentiator, people aren't going to be "talking about it" the way GP suggests!

[cromka]

> it's significant onboarding friction.

It's crazy that apparently writing software without knowing how to edit a single config file is normal now.

[johnnyApplePRNG]

It's crazy that apparently doing math without knowing how to do long division by hand is normal now.

[fc417fc802]

You're seriously suggesting that setting up opencode or tweaking your claude code config or etc is too much trouble to be worth saving $50 /mo? That's absurd. Doubly so when the audience in question is already using LLMs so ... just ask your existing LLM for help if it seems daunting.

[Schiendelman]

I'm not just suggesting that, I'm trying to be crystal clear: it's a gap that probably cuts TAM by 95% or more. Most LLM users are not software engineers. Even those that are don't care enough to muck with their settings to try out a model. Keep in mind I'm not answering the question "Is this hard to install?" - I'm answering the question "Why aren't people talking about this?"

[donohoe]

I would broadly agree with this (based on years of dealing directly with user-facing UX and setup steps). Small hurdles, even easy ones, create larger barriers to adoption then you’d think.

[fc417fc802]

Doesn't pass the sniff test. Casuals messing around already go to far more trouble to set up openclaw or comfyui or what have you.

[ramraj07]

Thats not absurd. Do you know what software engineers make? Do you know what a Starbucks coffee costs? 50 bucks is nothing for someone in that life.

[skeledrew]

The friction is near 0 when you can ask another LLM to set it up for you.

[Schiendelman]

Here are a few frictions I see that reduce reach, in order:

1) You haven't even heard of it.

2) You have to know to look for both GLM and Z.ai. These are usually in the same article when reporting about GLM is written, at least.

3) You have to understand there could be a benefit in trying it; you have to want to try it for some reason. Their own blog post puts it below Opus 4.8 in each of the three benchmarks they used.

4) You have to figure out the pricing, which isn't obviously in the blog post...

5) When I first went to Z.ai, I got an error popup (not logged in): "You do not have permission to access this resource. Please contact your administrator for assistance." I am using a personal computer...

6) When I typed something in the resultant field and pressed enter, I got "Clear Current Chat? To start a new chat, your current conversation will be discarded. Sign in to save chats"

I think today's article helped with 1 and 2, which helps their top of funnel. But they're fighting a big uphill battle.

[chillfox]

install opencode, then either pay $10 for their plan, or add an openrouter api key.

[re-thc]

> There's no installer.

There's ZCode (https://zcode.z.ai). Which is like the Codex App.

That's as "easy" as it is for non-devs that you're complaining about.

[qingcharles]

How does it compare to OpenCode? I already have too many LLM CLIs installed :(

[Schiendelman]

I'm not complaining about anything. I'm answering a question.

[gerryf2]

I agree with this.

I'd pay for an out of the box solution. i.e. an Installer with updates

[embedding-shape]

> Why aren't more people talking about this?

Wasn't this released like 2 days ago? Everyone is still evaluating and playing around with it, things like the submission is just starting to come out. Give it some days at least before jumping to conclusions, ideally weeks.

[unrvl22]

I cancelled my claude sub after realizing I can burn 300m tokens a day of this quality, for $50 a month.

[cedws]

In my org everyone is extremely Claude-pilled to the point you’d think it’s the only LLM that exists, purely because it caters to non-engineers within enterprises.

[knollimar]

Isn't it closer to sonnet?

[redox99]

Definitely opus level for coding.

[smith7018]

Do you have benchmarks or at least anecdotes to back that up? I'm not arguing with you; I would just love to see some proof that open models are getting as good as Anthropic's models.

[redox99]

I've been running some test prompts comparing frontier models for webdev, particularly pretty visualizations, physics / orbital simulations, etc.

Do note that GLM is not multi modal, which can be a deal breaker. And these open models are not good outside coding.

[unrvl22]

look at benchmarks, use the model yourself. Im usually first to call BS on every chinese model that says they are as good as Opus. this is finally the first one that actually is. It is a massive jump from every other previous chinese model.

[smith7018]

"use the model yourself"

I wish I had the time to set it up and work on side projects but unfortunately life and work have been crazy (as I'm sure many here feel). That's why I asked for anecdotes about it.

[Hamuko]

I’m not that interested in models that I can’t run on my desktop for ~0€, which is my AI budget.

[andai]

Electricity cost seems to be about $30/month for a 32B model on a GPU. It's probably better on Apple hardware.

https://github.com/QuantiusBenignus/Zshelf/discussions/2

Not accounting for hardware, of course :)

[NorwegianDude]

The price, processed tokens, and output can be anything, it just depends on what GPU it is.

Nvidia GPUs are much more efficient than Apple hardware for inference(and training).

[Hamuko]

My Mac Studio uses about 60–80 watts whenever I’m running a model (as measured by the system metrics), so it’s less than 2 kWh/day at full blast. Electricity is like 0.125 €/kWh, so that 24-hour period would be <0.25 €.

Not accounting hardware in my costs, since I didn’t buy my hardware for running models. Running models is just something it can do in addition to what I got it for.

[igravious]

Cool beans. You're not the target audience then.

[Hamuko]

Did I claim I was? I just said why I and people like me are not talking about it.

[simianwords]

and he said its cool

[anuramat]

> unlimited tokens for $50 a month

link?

> Why

imho everything but opus produces unusable code (fable was even better...), eg gpt5.5 seems to write the absolute worst code that still technically solves the problem; tbh I'd be totally willing to trade "raw intelligence" for "code taste"

more labs need to figure out whatever anthropic did to destroy everybody else on frontiercode bench

[CuriouslyC]

Opus has the nickname "Slopus" in a lot of circles for a reason. It can write nice code in isolation, but the way it organizes that code and its rigor in addressing edge cases/making sure things are robust leave a lot to be desired. Opus is particularly famous for having a real problem reinventing stuff that already existed in the codebase because it wanted to get to work before exploring sufficiently.