Valerius stood four meters tall—roughly thirteen feet. He was not merely a Space Marine; he was a biological singularity.

I'm surprised they still have the emdash and "not x, but y" quirks

> A new model is now available on http://chat.z.ai.

Looks like that's all they can handle atm:

> User traffic has increased tenfold in a very short time. We’re currently scaling to handle the load.

[1] https://x.com/Zai_org/status/2021564343029203032

You can calculate the exact cost of home inference, given you know your hardware and can measure electrical consumption and compare it to your bill.

I have no idea what cloud inference in aggregate actually costs, whether it’s profitable or a VC infused loss leader that will spike in price later.

That’s why I’m using cloud inference now to build out my local stack.

I presume here you are referring to running on the device in your lap.

How about a headless linux inference box in the closet / basement?

Return of the home network!

I don’t know where you draw the line between proprietary megacorp and not, but Z.ai is planning to IPO soon as a multi billion dollar company. If you think they don’t want to be a multi billion dollar megacorp like all of the other LLM companies I think that’s a little short sighted. These models are open weight, but I wouldn’t count them as OSS.

Also Chinese companies aren’t the only companies releasing open weight models. ChatGPT has released open weight models, too.

it is brilliant business strategy from China so i expect it to continue and be copied - good things.

reminds me of Google's investments into K8s.

I guess that's debatable. I regularly run out of quota on my claude max subscription. When that happens, I can sort of kind of get by with my modest setup (2x RTX3090) and quantized Qwen3.

And this does not even account for privacy and availability. I'm in Canada, and as the US is slowly consumed by its spiral of self-destruction, I fully expect at some point a digital iron curtain will go up. I think it's prudent to have alternatives, especially with these paradigm-shattering tools.

Framework Desktop! Half the memory bandwidth of M4 Max, but much cheaper.

It wouldn't surprise me if at some point in the future my local "Alexa" assistant will be fully powered by local Chinese OSS models with Chinese GPUs and RAM.

Of course, it's nice if I can run it myself as a last resort too.

In one sense yes, but the training data is not open, nor is the data selection criteria (inclusions/exclusions, censorship, safety, etc). So we are still subject to the whims of someone much more powerful that ourselves.

The good thing is that open weights models can be finetuned to correct any biases that we may find.

This blog post I was reading yesterday had some good knowledge compilation about the model.

https://blog.devgenius.io/z-ais-glm-5-leaked-through-github-...

"The distilled LLM isn't stealing the content from the 'parent' LLM, it is learning from the content just as a human would, surely that can't be illegal!"...

One can create 1000s of topic specific AI generated content websites, as a disclaimer each post should include prompt and used model.

Others can "accidentally" crawl those websites and include in their training/fine-tuning.

"I will save this for the future, when people complain about Chinese open models and tell me: But this Chinese LLM doesn't respond to question about Tianmen square."

Please stop using Tianmen question as an example to evaluate the company or their models: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779809

Interestingly GLM4.7-flash has no problem talking about it.

Here's the output when I asked about it.

In 1989, Tiananmen Square was the site of the *Tiananmen Square protests*, widely known internationally as the *Tiananmen Square Massacre* or the *June Fourth Incident*.

Here is a summary of the events:

*Causes and Beginning* The protests began on April 15, 1989, following the death of *Hu Yaobang*, a former Communist Party leader known for his relative openness and support for economic reform. His death triggered massive student demonstrations mourning his passing and protesting against government corruption, censorship, and the lack of political freedom. The movement quickly grew to include workers, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens.

*Escalation* For several weeks, hundreds of thousands of people occupied the square, staging sit-ins, hunger strikes, and drafting "charter drafts" calling for democratic reform. On May 13, hundreds of students began a hunger strike in the square. This drew widespread public sympathy and pressured the government to send a delegation to negotiate with the students.

*The Crackdown* In late May, as negotiations stalled, the Chinese government declared martial law and authorized the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to clear the square. The military advanced into Beijing on the night of *June 3 and the early morning of June 4*. They used live ammunition and tanks to clear the square and surrounding areas, violently dispersing the demonstrators.

*Casualties* There is significant disagreement over the death toll. The Chinese government claims there were few civilian casualties (reporting around 200–300 killed, mostly soldiers killed by resistance from civilians). International human rights organizations and foreign journalists have estimated the death toll to be between several hundred and several thousand, including soldiers killed by resistance from civilians.

*Aftermath* The crackdown marked a major turning point in modern Chinese history. The leadership of *Zhao Ziyang* (who favored negotiating with the students) was removed and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. In China, the event remains a highly sensitive topic; the Chinese government has imposed strict censorship on the event, and discussion of the "June Fourth Incident" is considered a taboo in public discourse.

*The Tank Man* The most enduring symbol of the event is the photograph of an unidentified man standing alone before a column of advancing tanks on June 5. This figure became a global icon of nonviolent resistance.