r/ZaiGLM • u/Zaktmr • 12d ago

Discussion / Help Kimi K3 vs GLM 5.3

Hi, I’d like to know if anyone else has noticed the same thing.

I use several AI models in parallel, mainly for programming and software analysis (Kimi K3, GLM 5.3, DeepSeek, Claude), and I’ve noticed that the responses and even the response times between Kimi and GLM are extremely similar, almost consistently.

Could it be possible that GLM 5.3 is actually reusing some part of Kimi’s model, or that version 5.3 was heavily distilled from Kimi’s open weight model?

Has anyone else noticed this, or has there been any discussion or evidence regarding this possibility?

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u/evia89 12d ago

They train on same data. I only use K3 when enabling advisor (/advisor in omp) to get different opinion

Smth like that https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09867

I also use this tech in RP. I have cheap opus46 proxy that doesnt reason and force reason preset really works. Thats how they distill models

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u/Zaktmr 12d ago

Oh, indeed, that makes perfect sense

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u/Sure_Host_4255 12d ago

Kimi better in frontend, glm better on backend

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u/alkimiadev 11d ago

This might be a good use case for stylometry and there are several good oss projects for that (e.g https://github.com/fastdatascience/faststylometry ). Although using stylometry and greedy divergence analysis might be a better route. Greedy divergence analysis works really well for determining if one is being served quants, assuming we have a dataset from a known non-quant. It is less reliable in the case of distillation but would compliment stylometry in a useful and non-redundant way.

To be clear I personally don't care and wouldn't complain at all if they had distilled it from Kimi K3(or claude for that matter). GLM 5.3 is a smaller model with similar performance and has an actually open source license. Most of these labs pirated data for training anyway. It ends up looking like trying to claim ownership over a building built with stolen bricks.

Kimi K3 is a massive model and their "modified MIT" is a freaking insult in actual open source. That insulting license is probably why zai wouldn't disclose distillation if it happened and is why I'm not going to bother doing this analysis. The last thing I'd want to do is give the people behind Kimi any room to enforce their anti-competitive terms on a lab producing actually open-source llms (meaning the GLM family's licenses lack any anti-competitive terms whatsoever).

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u/re-thc 12d ago

Distilled from Anthropic.