GLM-5.3-Flash is live on Featherless

Z.ai has identified the previously anonymous ox-alpha coding model as GLM-5.3-Flash, a 320-billion-parameter open-weight, MIT-licensed, natively multimodal mixture-of-experts model that was previewed using Chinese AI chips and is now available through Featherless. Compared with earlier GLM models, it uses fewer active parameters and layers while introducing combined linear and sparse attention, IndexPool compression for long contexts, and manifold-constrained hyper-connections to reduce compute and KV-cache requirements; it was trained on a 30-trillion-token multimodal corpus and supports image and video understanding. Z.ai reports that the model outperforms GLM-5.2 at roughly one-tenth the cost and posts competitive coding, agentic, and vision results against models including Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.6 Terra, and Gemini 3.7 Flash, while third-party Artificial Analysis assigns it an Intelligence Index score equal to Opus 4.8 at substantially lower estimated cost. The reported comparisons carry caveats, including reliance on Z.ai’s internal benchmarks, a “Flash” label referring to pricing rather than inference speed, and the benchmarked Opus version having since been superseded. Featherless serves the model through an OpenAI-compatible API with a 256K-token context window, FP8 quantization, tool calling, adjustable reasoning effort, and a stated no-logging policy, while offering dedicated GPU clusters for larger-scale or full-million-token deployments.

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