Gemma 4 26B A4B vs GLM 5V Turbo

Gemma 4 26B A4B is the Mixture-of-Experts variant in Google's Gemma 4 family, with 25.2B total parameters but only 3.8B active per token. Built from the same Gemini 3 research as the 31B dense sibling and released as open weights under the Apache 2.0 license, it supports a 256K token context window with text and image input and configurable thinking mode. The "A4B" in the name refers to its approximately 4B active parameters. The MoE design makes it significantly faster at inference than the dense 31B, running nearly as fast as a 4B-parameter model while delivering roughly 97% of the dense model's quality.

For vision tasks, the 26B A4B shares the same multimodal capabilities as the 31B image understanding with variable aspect ratios and resolutions, and structured bounding box output for UI element detection. The tradeoff versus the 31B dense model is a small quality reduction in exchange for much faster inference and lower hardware requirements, fitting in 18GB of VRAM at 4-bit quantization. It ranked #6 among open models on the Arena AI text leaderboard at launch.

GLM-5V-Turbo is a native multimodal model from Z.ai that extends the GLM family with joint image, video, and text input aimed at vision-centered coding and agent workflows. The model reads screenshots, design drafts, document layouts, and interface captures and generates runnable code from them, covering tasks such as turning a visual design into a working front end, diagnosing rendering and layout defects from screen captures, and operating graphical user interfaces during long-horizon agent runs. It accepts roughly 200,000 input tokens and can emit up to 131,072 output tokens in a single response, which supports sessions that hold specifications, source files, logs, and visual references at the same time.

Training includes a joint reinforcement learning stage spanning more than 30 tasks simultaneously, an approach Z.ai describes as a way to counter the trade-off in which improving visual recognition degrades programming ability and the reverse. Reported evaluations cover pure-text coding on the backend, frontend, and repository exploration tracks of CC-Bench-V2, together with agent execution suites such as PinchBench, ClawEval, and ZClawBench, indicating that text coding behavior is retained after visual input is added.