[em500]

We've had the great small Qwen 3.6 early April that many could actually run on their laptop. Then similar from Google a few weeks later (Gemma4, better in prose, worse in code). Then the super cheap large Deepseek V4 a few weeks later. Then antirez DS4 build that made that actually runnable on MacBooks and Mac Studios. And now the "near-frontier / near-Opus" GLM 5.2.

For people who follow open LLMs, none of these were quiet and all were the most interesting open model release for a few days/weeks. In one or two months, it will be some other model again. Now I do appreciate the real rapid improvements in open models. But there's also a ton of hype and fast-fashion around all of this.

[CuriouslyC]

The difference here is that those small models are impressive, but not super useful. Deepseek 4 is impressively cheap for the intelligence, but not reliable enough to daily drive unless your time has low value.

GLM passes a meaningful threshold of reliability/utility that puts it in a different category for real work. Just like Opus really took off after passing a threshold with 4.5. It's the first open model to do that.