GLM-4.5: Deeper, Headier, & better than Kimi/Qwen/DeepSeek (SOTA China LLM?)
Z.ai (Zhipu AI) released the GLM-4.5-355B-A32B and GLM-4.5-Air-106B-A12B open weights models, claiming state-of-the-art performance competitive with Claude 4 Opus, Grok 4, and OpenAI's o3. These models emphasize token efficiency and efficient reinforcement learning training validated by the Muon optimizer. Alibaba Qwen introduced Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO), a new reinforcement learning algorithm powering the Qwen3 model suite, integrated into Hugging Face's TRL library. Speculation surrounds mystery models "summit" and "zenith" as potential GPT-5 variants based on GPT-4.1 architecture. Qwen3-Coder shows strong coding benchmark results, rivaling Claude Sonnet 4 and Kimi K2. The rise of powerful Chinese open-source models like GLM-4.5, Wan-2.2, and Qwen3 Coder contrasts with a slowdown from Western labs such as OpenAI.