GLM-5.2 arrived last week. It boasts excellent benchmarks and looks strong.

Benchmarks here are a de facto ceiling of how good it is, not a point estimate. Essentially all other aspects of an open model like this, beyond speed and price, will almost always be worse than the numbers suggest. Still, impressive.

It is definitely a large step up from GLM-5.1, and likely the strongest open model.

GLM-5.2 is still substantially behind the absolute frontier, although plausibly on the cost-benefit Pareto frontier. It seems closer to the frontier than previous efforts, including probably closer than DeepSeek R1 was during the DeepSeek moment.

This is the new ‘peak close behind’ moment. Its existence is a substantial updates to push back some of the ‘where are all the updates’ updates in the opposite direction over time.

Purely in terms of core tasks that GLM-5.2 is capable of doing, and ignoring missing features and its inferior generalization, and ignoring that it is distilled from Claude, and ignoring the Mythos class of models, and marking purely from date of public release, you can make a case GLM-5.2 is somewhere between 4 months and 7 months behind the frontier [...]

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Outline:

(02:01) Alex Bores For Congress In NY-12

(03:41) Signs of Life

(05:05) The Benchmarks

(09:02) GLM-5.2 Is Distilled From Claude

(09:55) Positive Responses

(16:00) Finding The Niche

(17:30) Negative Reactions

(20:05) Looking To The Future

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First published:
June 22nd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reXkwJbB8GYdeuvDt/glm-5-2-is-the-new-best-open-model

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Graph showing DeepSWE score versus average cost per task for various AI models.

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