China's Top-Notch AI Model: Is GLM-4.5 Leading the Chinese AI Sector Currently?
Z.ai, a leading AI company, has unveiled its latest creation – the GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air models. These open-source AI models, featuring Mixture of Experts (MoE) architectures, are designed for high efficiency and comprehensive capabilities in reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks.
The GLM-4.5 model boasts 355 billion total parameters with 32 billion active, while its more compact sibling, GLM-4.5 Air, has 106 billion total parameters and 12 billion active parameters. Both models support a "thinking mode" for complex inference and a "non-thinking mode" for fast responses.
Global Rankings and Benchmarks
According to Z.ai, GLM-4.5 is the top-performing open-source model, ranking 3rd globally across 12 comprehensive benchmarks spanning reasoning, coding, and agentic capabilities. It scored 63.2 overall, just behind the top model Grok-4 (63.6) and ahead of Claude 4 Opus (60.9).
In terms of reasoning, GLM-4.5 demonstrated its prowess by solving complex problems in mathematics, science, and logic. For web browsing, it outperformed Claude-4-Opus by 18.8% on the BrowseComp benchmark.
In coding, both GLM-4.5 models excel at building coding projects from scratch and agentically solving coding tasks in existing projects. In agentic coding tasks, GLM-4.5 demonstrated a 53.9% win rate against Kimi K2 and outperformed other models like Claude-4-Sonnet and Qwen3-Coder.
Efficiency and Integration
The efficiency of GLM-4.5 is noteworthy. It uses significantly fewer parameters than some competing models like DeepSeek-R1 and Kimi-K2 while outperforming them on many benchmarks, meaning it lies on the Pareto frontier for performance-per-parameter.
The GLM-4.5 models can be seamlessly integrated into existing coding toolkits such as Claude Code, Roo Code, and CodeGeex.
A Step Toward Sovereign AI Stacks
GLM 4.5 is more than just another number in a leaderboard; it's a stepping stone toward sovereign AI stacks. The smaller GLM-4.5-Air model, with its competitive performance and compact size, delivers strong efficiency and positions itself as a strong open-source alternative in 2025 AI capabilities.
In summary, Z.ai's GLM-4.5 series competes at the highest global level, ranking among the top three AI models worldwide in comprehensive benchmarks and outperforming several leading Western AI systems, especially in reasoning and coding tasks. Its more compact GLM-4.5 Air variant delivers strong efficiency and competitive results against larger Western models, making it a promising choice for those seeking open-source AI solutions.
About Sarthak Dogra
This article was written by Sarthak Dogra, a technical content strategist and communicator with a decade of experience in content creation and distribution across national media, Government of India, and private platforms.
[1] Z.ai's Press Release
[2] TechCrunch Article
[3] Z.ai's Blog Post
[4] ArXiv Paper
The GLM-4.5 series, as cited in the press release from Z.ai, employs artificial-intelligence technology and is designed for high efficiency and comprehensive capabilities, including reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks. This model is a stepping stone towards sovereign AI stacks, as suggested by Sarthak Dogra in his article.
The more compact GLM-4.5 Air model, despite having fewer total parameters, supports a "thinking mode" for complex inference and a "non-thinking mode" for fast responses, showcasing its potential for future technological advancements utilizing artificial-intelligence.
