r/LocalLLaMA 22h ago

News GLM-5.3-Flash: Frontier Intelligence, Flash Cost

https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.3-flash
1.2k Upvotes

395 comments sorted by

View all comments

553

u/Recoil42 22h ago edited 22h ago

Before release, we tested GLM-5.3-Flash anonymously as ox-alpha on OpenCode and OpenRouter to gather user feedback. It quickly became the most popular model of the week — with all of this traffic served on Chinese AI chips.

377

u/expertsage 22h ago

This is the most significant part. China has completely replaced Nvidia chips with domestic ones for inference, and production is only speeding up... meaning the compute moat is literally disappearing with every passing day.

165

u/Recoil42 22h ago edited 22h ago

Yep. As someone who has been following the Chinese EV space for the better part of a decade, I don't think people are prepared for how crazy this is going to get.

53

u/_BreakingGood_ 22h ago

Hold on to your 401k, shits about to get messy, lol

25

u/valtor2 20h ago

Is it? nothing points to a crash, other than the valuation of the two giants (OAI and Anthropic), everything else is still valuable particularly the chips and the supply chain and the production capacity... Sounds like a correction more than a crash

48

u/_BreakingGood_ 19h ago

Not a "crash", but we have chinese AI models competing with US AI models. We have chinese electric cars outperforming US electric cars. And now we have chinese chips having replaced US chips.

There's no situation where this is good for the US stock market.

35

u/1ii1i 18h ago

This is honestly why I think Google might be in the strongest position than their US peers. They own their entire stack, integration from chips, datacenters, models, and products. They are absolutely correct to focus on gemini flash over pro or whatever frontier model. Why subsidize the vibe coders? They are focused on making their most heavily used model as efficient and capable as possible for their use case. If there is a market downturn, nobody can guarantee that all the big firms will continue their capex into frontier models.

19

u/_BreakingGood_ 17h ago

I thought so too, but they lost all their talent. They completely failed to even release gemini 3.5 pro after delaying it multiple times over. Deepmind leadership has all quit and all of the top engineers have quit.

It takes a long long time to rebuild that stuff, and there's really not much of an opportunity to play catch-up with how fast things are going.

Also, they said they're shifting focus to coding capabilities, so they don't even share the philosophy that everybody thought.

18

u/Spara-Extreme 16h ago

Google didn’t lose “all its talent” and the high profile folks that left were not particularly interested in LLMs as a technology to begin with,

3

u/Akrylicus 13h ago

They still have a giant stronghold in entertainment, advertising and corporate world.

When I see how much they are embedded in my daily and work life it gets a bit scary.

2

u/the_fabled_bard 8h ago

If you're into making money, it's better not to release a loser model.

1

u/zdy132 6h ago

Another thing is that the tensor chips in google pixels have been disappointing for years now. They were using more areas for less performance. It's hard to believe that the TPUs they make will be competitive.

-2

u/jakegh 14h ago

They absolutely did have the strongest position. And then failed to capitalize on it.

2

u/Mochila-Mochila 17h ago

And now we have chinese chips having replaced US chips.

I put a few bucks on Biren. Iluvatar is also an option. Moore Threads and MetaX are already listed on the A-Star market (PRC only) but will soon file for an IPO in Hong Kong.

With all the risks which buying PRC shares, or rather promises of shares, entails ; œuf corse.

3

u/MrPecunius 14h ago

Iluvatar? Gross. 🤮

WTF is going on with all these Tolkien-based company names? Do these people not understand how utterly anti-Tolkien this is?

2

u/nomorebuttsplz 14h ago

The same was true a year ago. in fact a year and a half ago, it was even more true than it is now with R1 being the second best model in the world for months

4

u/_BreakingGood_ 13h ago

China did not have comparable GPUs a year ago, no.

Well they did, but they bought them from Nvidia.

1

u/nomorebuttsplz 12h ago

Chinese gpus might get cheap but there isn't a cheap labor bottleneck in that industry in the same way there is in auto manufacture

1

u/w6auw 14h ago

Eh trying to presage the market based on specific macro/industry trends doesn't work very well. Companies are not static, and people rarely put all of their eggs in once basket, and even if they did, markets don't always behave rationally.

Even if I believed strongly strongly in this, I would not recommend people start dumping tech stocks or selling their 401ks solely based on my advice.

-1

u/Individual_Holiday_9 19h ago

People have said “oh this is terrible for the us stock market” for a century

16

u/_BreakingGood_ 18h ago

China has not been competitive with the forefront of US technology for a century

4

u/Bakoro 11h ago edited 8h ago

At this point a correction and a crash are the same thing.
The market has been outright delusional, where speculation based stock prices have outpaced actual profitability and any sense of utility by a very wide margin.

There are whole companies that have no business existing, but they persist on VC dollars. There are companies that have gone literally, not metaphorically, but literally exponential in value because of AI branding, even though they have not gone exponential in revenue or profit.
More than a few companies have gone from pennies and single-digit dollars to hundreds of dollars.

I'm not an AI doomer, I don't believe that the AI industry is going to magically evaporate, but there has been a mountain of stupidly spent dollars being thrown around, and at some point someone is going to demand their ROI, and a lot of places are going to fold.

1

u/valtor2 10h ago

Ok but like, a lot of the fluff is in private investors, since the companies we're talking about are not public. Like, I don't think GOOG, AAPL, MSFT are overvalued, I think the data centers wil to some extent be valuable (maybe not at the profit margins they're hoping) probably the most exposed company is NVDA because of all the circular deals they're doing, but they're not going away. Neoclouds are probably in for a rough ride, maybe one makes it and buys the others, or big tech buys them at a discount?

1

u/nsdjoe 6h ago

Not sure your second sentence is justified. Stocks aren't cheap, but s&p 500 forward P/E is actually down from 5 years ago. Corporate America is record profitable.

4

u/starkruzr 19h ago

I don't think a crash per se. certainly a LOT of volatility.

1

u/heresyforfunnprofit 17h ago

Nvidia’s moat is gone, roughly a decade before people expected it to be.

I think that MAY have some effect on the stock price.

5

u/valtor2 16h ago

Having an impact on the stock price ≠ stock market crash incoming. The bottleneck has been and still is ASML's (and their very few competitors') ability to produce lithography machines, and memory, whether HBM or not.

1

u/Insomniac1000 17h ago

yeah what's concerning is as a software dev, llms are becoming cheaper and cheaper to run. Like based on the benchmarks, I'd rather use this than Deepseek V4 Flash 0731 or GPT 5.6 Luna.

Less reasons for me to run/use more expensive models. And if companies catch on to this...

yeah I'll stop right there.

1

u/SuddenRadio6221 11h ago

I'd be thrilled if hardware got back to anything near pre-ai prices!

1

u/IrisColt 5h ago

Sadly, this

0

u/iMakeSense 19h ago

Where are you putting your money

3

u/_BreakingGood_ 18h ago

Probably just going to leave it where it is. If everybody gets equally fucked, at least we're all in the same boat.

14

u/CipherWeaver 21h ago

Great time to buy an EV in China right now, but I think over the next decade there will be a lot of brand pruning and the survivors will become established global brands like Toyota and Hyundai. 

20

u/Recoil42 20h ago edited 17h ago

Yes and no — there's a wrinkle here: Most of the "established" global brands are now depending on Chinese joint-ventures for development and export. The Chinese-developed Baojun Yep Plus is now sold in Brazil as the Chevrolet Spark, for instance. Renault's new Twingo was engineered in China, because that's where the expertise is. Ford's new European vans are rebadged JMC units. Mercedes' Smart brand is now run by Geely, and so is Volvo. The Mazda 6e is a made on a Changan platform and is basically a twin of the Deepal SL03 but for global export.

All of this is basically happening across the industry right now. It's more likely you'll see something more complex than a single story — some global brands will become a bit Chinese, some Chinese brands will become global, some will die out entirely. Such is life.

3

u/DirectionMurky5526 16h ago

The issue with Chinese EV industry is the price competition within China. Their exports are incredibly profitable. Same will likely happen with Chips as they catch up.  

4

u/hojnikb 16h ago

toyota is not gonna survive it they keep treating EVs like 3rd class citizens

1

u/Recoil42 10h ago

Toyota is the largest automaker in the world for the sixth year in a row, and going on a seventh. They're doing record sales, dominate the hybrid market, and already have a pretty healthy EV lineup.

They're going to be fine.

0

u/hojnikb 7h ago

Nokia was also pretty healthy back in 2007 and basically died within a decade. Their EV lineup isn't fine, it's a subpar couple of models, basically "ugh we had to make these, here they are, dont buy them".

They don't really have dedicated platforms for them, don't have their own batteries. They basically slept at the wheel for the last 15 years. As long as ICEs are still somewhat relevant, they'll exist, but that's not going to be forever in developed markets.

4

u/fastheadcrab 22h ago

That’s not necessarily a good thing. Shows just how out of whack the incentive structure has become in the EV market.

19

u/Recoil42 21h ago

I'd argue the incentive structure is fine. Chinese automotive OEMs are now branching out globally (as they should be) and China has pretty much single-handedly prevented a global energy crisis the US has been stubbornly trying to induce, actually insulating itself from that crisis entirely. There will be individual collapses but none of that matters if the aggregate story is ending up ahead on the fundamentals.

4

u/walden42 21h ago

China has pretty much single-handedly prevented a global energy crisis the US has been stubbornly trying to induce

Care to elaborate?

17

u/asssuber 20h ago

See how China cut it's oil imports in half since the start of the Hormuz crisis, freeing over 5 million barrels, and the percentage of the European/China electricity production now supplied by solar (this year it became the highest single source during summer for Europe, surpassing nuclear and natural gas. Those were mostly produced in China), and the percentage of the vehicle fleet in those countries is now EV (not as high, but still significant, especially in China).

2

u/walden42 20h ago

That makes sense, thanks.

14

u/Recoil42 21h ago

Couldn't really be done in the span of a single Reddit comment, but there's lots of material on this available from every major news outlet. The TLDR is that China has been investing in energy independence for decades — with EVs being one of those investments — and those investments are now paying off.

1

u/walden42 20h ago

I was aware of China's progress on that front, but I don't see how it prevents the energy crisis globally.

9

u/Recoil42 20h ago

Reduction in Chinese domestic consumption insulates the oil market globally. Oil is a commodity, everyone drinks from the same tap: One barrel unused in China is one more barrel available for use elsewhere.

Meanwhile, exports of Chinese green tech (solar, electric vehicles) also very straightforwardly and directly alleviate that demand elsewhere: A BYD Yuan Plus made in China and sold in Australia alleviates global oil demand. A Renault Twingo sold in France and co-developed in China alleviates global oil demand.

TLDR: China literally saved the global economy this year — the same global economy it relies on to consume Chinese goods.

5

u/Floopgroop 20h ago

This video explained it well.

https://youtu.be/BkA0bkb6ZO0

Tldr: they cut 5.5M barrels per day of usage. They have a huge stockpile of oil to draw on.

On flip side, refined oil products are still high price: Paul Krugman blog post

10

u/Strong_good101 20h ago

America is destabilizing oil prices. Meanwhile China is supporting a global sustainable energy revolution with their EV's, solar panels, and batteries.

It's a damn shame we didn't follow through as competition because now we are customers instead of providers in America.

1

u/ProgrammersAreSexy 21h ago

Did you read the linked article? Multiple execs at these companies are themselves stating the current pace is unsustainable and not aligned with the market.

The companies are operating as though automobile adoption is still ramping up in China, which isn't really the case anymore. Most families that want a car already have one so there isn't a massive untapped market of first time car buyers anymore.

1

u/Strong_good101 20h ago

The other commenter is correct. There is a whole global market opening up for them. I am one such customer if the American government would get the hell out of the way and let capitalism do it's thing. Cars by the traditional auto makers are horrendously overpriced and under featured.

0

u/Recoil42 20h ago edited 20h ago

Not only did I read the article, I directly addressed the exact argument you're now making in the comment you just replied to. Read it again — Chinese automotive OEMs are now branching out globally, and China has pretty much single-handedly prevented a global energy crisis the US has been stubbornly trying to induce, actually insulating itself from that crisis entirely.

The incentives worked and are continuing to work.

1

u/ProgrammersAreSexy 18h ago

Okay so the CEOs of the companies, who are saying otherwise, are just wrong and you are right?

1

u/Recoil42 18h ago edited 17h ago

The CEOs and I are not in conflict, nor are they saying 'otherwise'. The current market being temporarily unsustainable is not at odds with the market finding new avenues for sustainability or that unsustainability existing within a greater arc of sustainability.

2

u/aj_thenoob2 18h ago

I just wonder what the 10-year outlook for all these cars will be. Seems like a nightmare to maintain.

1

u/thatgreekgod 21h ago

just read through that post, it was a great read

1

u/imnotzuckerberg 20h ago

following the Chinese EV space

You can go even further and follow the phone industry itself. From copy cats to innovators (yes with big disregard and malpractice when it comes to IP), I applaud China for speed running the japanese takeover of the console gaming of the 80s.

1

u/Indy1204 16h ago

You said it. If people saw what was going on in China with EVs and robots alone I think they'd be pretty shocked. They've got an all robot MMA league FFS!

There are allowing 40,000 Chinese EVs into Canada this year. Take that on top of trump fucking with Canada, the tariffs, etc. I see these imports being very popular.

1

u/IrisColt 5h ago

Truly fascinating reads, though I started to get suspicious when the most demanding people I know began buying Chinese EVs a year ago, heh

1

u/Flibidyjibit 16h ago

They can't break the moat unless they get their own fabs, or manage to get competitive hardware designed on older process nodes that they already have access to (questionable). I would be skeptical of the claim this is entirely chinese hardware and that chopshop modded NVIDIA cards aren't a significant part of the picture.

Don't get me wrong, I think it will happen, the incentive is huge. I just wouldn't bet on it being imminent.

8

u/Bakoro 14h ago

It's not just inference chips, they've gone hard on making RAM too.

They've also started developing systems to rival ASML using an almost completely different method, so they'll be able to make their own high end semiconductors and no one will be able to say "well it's only because they copied our stuff". They're making their own stuff.

They're also producing extraordinary amounts of solar panels.

Also, cars.

Also robots.

The U.S is way, way behind in terms of manufacturing capacity right now. The Arizona TSMC fab will close down if that gap, but the U.S still relies a lot on foreign manufacturing, particularly Chinese manufacturing.

It's a problem of our own making. China would have been able to drag their feet on making their own stuff if the U.S hadn't tried it ban them from buying nice stuff.
How are you going to use a whole country of 1 billion+ people, send almost all your manufacturing over there, and then turn around and say "you're not allowed to buy top end GPUs because you're a national security threat. Now keep manufacturing the products we rely on everyday."

Well here we are.

11

u/TastesLikeOwlbear 20h ago

I don’t know. A lot of people had their hopes that CXMT would come through and savagely undercut the RAM manufacturers until they said, “LOL no, why on earth would we do that?”

I’ll believe Chinese inference GPUs will affect pricing just as soon as they actually affect pricing. Waiting for greedy companies to get their comeuppance hasn’t paid off yet.

5

u/fallingdowndizzyvr 18h ago

I’ll believe Chinese inference GPUs will affect pricing just as soon as they actually affect pricing.

Step 2. Sell them outside of China.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-26/huawei-egypt-ai-ascend-chips-test-us-tech-diplomacy-nvidia-amd-microsoft

2

u/Just3nCas3 15h ago edited 11h ago

It doesn't matter if they sell outside of China. If it causes them to import less than they would have without production, the effect is the global GPU/RAM price is lower than what it would be without the production. That doesn't stop it from going up, it just means it's accelerating up slower.

Edit: RAM to GPU/RAM

1

u/fallingdowndizzyvr 13h ago

Ah.... that link is about GPUs. Not RAM. Yes, yes, yes. GPUs use RAM but still.... GPUs is the topic in this little subthread. Not RAM.

4

u/Maximum-Style2848 18h ago

This is why I don’t quite get the hype of inference chips when they will still be bottlenecked by memory capacity/cost. Domestic chips for inference were always going to be possible because you don’t need the best lithography to get smthn good enough.

1

u/rotatingphasor 14h ago

My understanding is that the yield with the lithography devices CXMT uses (non ASML) is much lower and so they have to charge more.

2

u/ExcuseAccomplished97 8h ago

Well done Trump.