[pietz]

GLM 5.2 has one big issue that will limit its meaningful success and that's the value of their coding subscription.

Yes, in terms of API pricing, GLM 5.2 outperforms the competition. But the only people that use API billing for their coding work are large corporations, where these highly subsidized subscriptions are being fazed out.

At the same time, none of these companies will use a Chinese API for their employees.

For individuals and smaller teams, Z.ai's coding subscription is outperformed by Anthropic and OpenAI. You probably get around the same usage with Claude, but Codex definitely offers more usage for the amount you pay.

We can have a debate how much Z.ai closed the gap to GPT5.5 and Opus 4.8, but if I can freely decide between them in a world where they all cost the same, I simply wouldn't choose GLM.

So the important question becomes: How good will the offering from Z.ai get with GLM 5.3 or 6 and how much will OpenAI and Anthropic cripple their current offering in the near future.

[twobitshifter]

Taking a view from outside the USA, European companies just had Fable taken away due to US export controls, and before that Anthropic announced it is holding their data for 30 days. There is immediate value to these firms to build their infrastructure around an AI that won’t be pulled away from them. And outside of Europe, other countries are more price sensitive and don’t have the same fear of building relationships with Chinese companies.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

> But the only people that use API billing for their coding work are large corporations

As well as people using 3rd party harnesses like OpenCode.

> At the same time, none of these companies will use a Chinese API for their employees

So who are Amazon Bedrock (who serve GLM) targetting?

Individuals are presumably going with one of the cheaper US providers such as DeepInfra ($0.18/M cached input for GLM vs $0.50 for Opus) or Fireworks AI.

[Certhas]

My impression is that individual subscriptions are the loss leading hook. The money is made on Enterprise token contracts.

Employees and students used to coding with thousands of dollars worth of tokens (on a 20/100 dollar plan) will push enterprise to spend.

Having a Chinese model that is competitive won't displace this enterprise spend. But an open model hosted in the US/EU might.

The existence of GLM 5.2 puts a ceiling on how much OpenAI/Anthropic can charge for API Access.

[LUmBULtERA]

> My impression is that individual subscriptions are the loss leading hook

Except there is no evidence of this at all, just people comparing API and subscription pricing. The leaked financial info for OpenAI shows inference is profitable right now, though it does not show a distinction between subscription and API revenue... but if subscription revenue was so lossy, it would hard for total inference to still be profitable.

[Certhas]

I did clearly say "my impression is". And you have no evidence to the contrary. We don't even reliably in w how many subscribers Vs enterprise customers they have. And the OpenAI leak doesn't even cleanly say that inference is profitable from what I can tell... The better evidence that it probably is are the prices charged by open weight model providers.

[LUmBULtERA]

Fair enough, there is not strong specific evidence to the contrary except about overall inference being profitable for OpenAI (as well as the open weight model providers hosted throughout the world).

[CuriouslyC]

Anthropic has indicated in the past that API gross margins are ~60%. This might have improved since then, though competition from OAI puts a ceiling on that.

[LUmBULtERA]

Subscription inference can also be cheaper than the cost of API inference if the provider wants it to -- providers can do flexible scheduling for subscription inference for example, around API inference, to lower its cost and get better utilization of the hardware.

[fbnszb]

> The existence of GLM 5.2 puts a ceiling on how much OpenAI/Anthropic can charge for API Access.

I believe this is the reason why we can even have this debate. Without this kind of competition we would not have these subsidies.

[pietz]

To be clear, I agree with this and they have my unlimited support pushing for relevance of open source models. GLM 5.2 is amazing and I couldn't be more excited.

I just think that as of today, most people will not find a good reason to switch to GLM.

[edg5000]

This is an important point. I suspect API pricing will eventually disappear just like how paying for an MMS disappeared. It's an antiquated model. The bulk of the work is being done on "coding plans" is my wild guess.

It's annoying that the plans are so restrictive beyond usage limits. Understandable maybe, but annoying. In practice, only Anthropic (and maybe Google) are really restrictive though. They really scared me away with their policy of charging API rates after the fact if they consider your usage not TOS-aligned. This might be an ungrounded fear that I have, but I feel this is something they'd do so they scared me away.

[tpm]

Also, I was testing out the GLM 5.2 using Openrouter because that's where I've got an account with some money and then when I wanted to perhaps subscribe for a better deal at z.ai, their infra was clearly overloaded to the point the 5.2 was timing out on 100% of chat requests, so perhaps I will try later when the infrastructure catches up with the model capability. Only then I can make sure their subscription is worth it.

[jauntywundrkind]

I'm on glm pro subscription and I get so so so much more usage than Claude or Codex! I hammer on glm all day. It's a more expensive plan, but I would need a much much much bigger plan for codex or Claude to do what I do.