On Aug 26, 2026 China's Z.ai released GLM-5.3-Flash, a 320B-parameter (18B active) mixture-of-experts model with a 1M-token context and native image/video input, under an MIT license. API pricing is roughly $0.15/$0.50 per million input/output tokens and it lands within ~0.7 points of Claude Opus 4.8 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (84.3 vs 85.0).
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Z.ai ships GLM-5.3-Flash: 1M-context multimodal coding model at ~1/10 the price
Why this matters for founders
Founders running agentic or coding workloads can slot in a cheap, openly licensed long-context model to cut inference costs; self-host the MIT weights or call the API for large-document tasks.
Source: MarkTechPost
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