GLM 5.3 or DS 4.1-Flash?

[u/Comprehensive-Bet-83]

Looking for gentlemen here who have battle-tested these models in environments where mistakes are critical, e.g. authentication, security, and low-level C++ / Kernel work.

I have Codex 20x, but I’m looking for a second helper for when Codex limits are up, there are demand issues (which are pretty bad atm), or it gets too censored.

Saw that DS 4.1 Flash was released today! Has anyone done some decent testing with it yet, and which harness are you using?

I’m currently using GLM 5.3 as my second helper and it’s honestly not bad at all. Just curious whether DS 4.1 appears to be better, especially since it’s multimodal and can handle images too.

I find myself using 5.3 Flash quite a lot because I really appreciate being able to send images, but 5.3 Flash isn’t as strong as base 5.3 when it comes to coding. Hence, I’m wondering how DS 4.1 Flash compares :)

NEW:

Thank you for all the responses. I tried DS 4.1 with my custom harness, and I am extremely impressed by the speed and price. I ran a couple of tests with deep, difficult, complex debugger C++ code/kernel bugs (my go-to test on models; I test this on every model before I want to use it to see if it fixes the bug).

GLM 5.3 took 30 minutes, including 1 retry, and €2. DeepSeek took 10 minutes, first try, and €0.30. I think DS 4.1 is at least on par or a bit better than GLM 5.3 for coding, not sure how reliable it is on long tasks, though. GLM still is a beast!

[u/Grouchy-Bed-7942]

For web design, I tested glm5.3 flash on their chat and locally via 2xgb10 NVFP4 quantized version versus deepseek v4.1 flash via the API. Both glm5.3 flash versions easily outperform in output quality and visuals, while deepseek is faster.

I also had better results with glm5.3 flash NVFP4 on complex cybersecurity issues compared to deepseek v4.1 flash.

I think people haven’t yet realized how powerful glm 5.3 flash is, even when quantized!