GLM 5.2 total victory: the week open source won and nobody panicked

Hey, it’s Alex. Next month is my 40th b-day, and honestly, my wish for that month is to have a week like this week. A very chill, almost nothing announced week.This week started strong, with Sakana announcing FUGU (AI router) that can beat Fable (which we didn’t get back yet), and then... quiet. The most important thing in AI this week from a release standpoint is that GLM 5.2 from Z.AI is having it’s DeepSeek moment! Tons of new love for this model since last week! (+ we have the fastest GLM 5.2 deployment in the world with CW inference!) The rest we can quickly count on one hand, Anthropic added Claude to Slack (which made folks hate Andrej Karpathy), OpenAI announced their own inference chip, GPT 5.6 will be delayed and the US Gov will decide who gets it (yes really) and Sean Grove joined us to talk about Linzumi and his vision for running 10,000 agent hours per person per day. Oh and next week, is a special AI Engineer live stream from World’s Fair! Don’t miss itLet’s get into it! Subscribe to never miss a beat! GLM 5.2 is having its DeepSeek moment (HF, CW Inference)We covered GLM 5.2 last week, but this week was when the rest verdict came in! We’ve never seen a better MIT licenced AI model! GLM 5.2 is scoring top scores on agentic benchmarks (Arena.ai), Design benchmarks, Legal tasks and full on software engineering tasks. The jump in generations from prevoius GLM is also massive and notable, as the lab is working on creating the next version of GLM (per the CEO’s reply to Elon on X).Peter from Arena pulled up the Agent Arena numbers and they align with the vibe. GLM 5.2 sits above 5.1 but below Opus and Fable, which feels about right. Where it gets wild is Web Dev Arena: second place, right after Fable. Peter’s take was that GLM has really good defaults. If you just say “give me a webpage” it gives you something nice. GPT models, by contrast, start off looking bad and need more steering.Last week, I asked my agents with GLM 5.2 to create a custom ThursdAI.news page for itself and it did a marvelous job! Look at that beautiful font, the castle it made... this is all just delignful. We also played Hassan’s blind test on the show. It’s a website that @nutlope built that lets you try and guess which webpage was built by which model. Nisten nailed it immediately by spotting Opus’s circular buttons. Wolfram guessed right too. I got one wrong. The point isn’t that GLM beats Opus, it’s that you genuinely can’t always tell which one costs 22 cents and which one costs 3 cents.Wolfram did flag that GLM is not good in German. First response already had mistakes. So if you’re building for a non-English market, keep that in mind. It’s a workhorse model, not a conversationalist. His approach: use GPT 5.5 for planning and discussion, GLM for the actual work, then GPT reviews. This weeks Buzz is all about GLM 5.2! First, we may have not been the fastest, but I’m glad to announce that we’re the fastest provider to host GLM 5.2 on OpenRouter (at least at the time of writing this)! We’re also not to shabby on the Artificial Analysis checks, clocking at #4 among the providers they tested for speed, TTFT and costAlso, Wolfram ran his WolfBench tests on GLM 5.2 and it’s the best open model he’s ever tested! In this new 3d view, wolfbench also shows the number of tokens it took for this test to run, and you can see that GLM 5.2 is fairly conservative with it’s thinking budgets! Unsloth’s 1-bit GLM 5.2 runs on a Mac Studio (X, HF)Shout out to Daniel Han and the Unsloth team, who took this 744B beast and quantized it down to a roughly 200GB GGUF that fits on a Mac Studio with 256GB of RAM. One bit still makes me laugh out loud. How does that even work. Nisten clarified it’s a mixed quant, a true 1-bit would be under 100GB, but still.The wild part is the scores hold up. The 1-bit is within a point of GPT 5.5 on Frontier SWE, hits 62% on SWE-bench Pro, and 81% on Terminal-Bench. For a 1-bit quant that’s incr