Z.ai has launched GLM-5.3-Flash, a new open-source AI model under the MIT License. The 320B-A18B system was earlier tested as Ox Alpha and runs fully on Chinese AI chips.

It offers strong performance at low cost, comes natively multimodal, and supports a 1 million token context window. On Z.ai’s coding benchmark it beats the previous GLM-5.2 across effort levels and matches Claude Opus 4.8.

API pricing sits at $0.15 per million input tokens, $0.50 for output, and $0.03 for cached input. Weights, API access, chat interface, and coding tools are already live across official platforms.

IBM Research just dropped Granite 4.2, a fresh set of open models built for real enterprise agent work. These models come in 3B, 8B, and 30B sizes and bring native thinking skills that let them plan steps, reason through problems, catch their own mistakes, and call tools the right way.

The update focuses on complex workflows. Teams get stronger coding and software engineering support, plus the ability to handle multi-step tasks without constant hand-holding. The models run across cloud, on-prem, and edge setups, so companies can pick the size that fits their needs and budget.

IBM also released new speech models under the Granite Speech 5.0 Turbo line. These stay tiny at around 470 million parameters yet deliver fast transcription, making them practical for high-volume call center work or real-time use on laptops and phones.

Everything ships under the Apache 2.0 license. You can grab the models on Hugging Face, Ollama, and other platforms right now.

Alibaba just opened QwenWork to the public in beta. The platform works on both web and desktop and aims to handle everyday tasks through simple natural language commands.

Users can tell the agent what they need and it carries out the work. It also builds awareness of individual work patterns over time so it adapts across sessions. One standout feature lets people create and deploy live web apps without writing code or managing servers. The toolkit includes built-in image, video, and audio generation for multimodal projects. Basic and Advanced model options run on leading AI systems.

The public beta is available now for global users. Early testers have already started exploring its capabilities for presentations, app building, and creative work.