GLM 5.3 Flash vs Muse Glimmer 30B

GLM-5.3-Flash is the first natively multimodal model in Z.ai's GLM-5 series, a mixture-of-experts transformer with roughly 320 billion total parameters and 18 billion activated per token. It routes each token through 8 of 288 experts across 45 language layers that interleave KDA linear attention with sparse multi-head latent attention, and pairs them with a 24-layer vision encoder that handles image and video input. The checkpoint declares a maximum context length of 1,048,576 tokens, ships in native FP8, and includes a multi-token prediction draft layer for speculative decoding. Z.ai reports that the hybrid attention design reduces attention computation by 3.01x and KV cache size by 4.44x relative to GLM-5.3.

The model starts from a newly trained base built on a 30 trillion token multimodal pre-training corpus and adopts Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections to improve scaling efficiency. Vision is integrated into the coding and agent loop, so the model can inspect interfaces, rendered output, and images while operating across code, browsers, and graphical user interfaces. Z.ai reports scores of 84.3 on Terminal-Bench 2.1, 63.4 on DeepSWE 1.1, 55.3 on Humanity's Last Exam with tools, and 48.8 on AutomationBench, and the model exposes low, high, and max thinking modes.

Muse Glimmer 30B is a dense vision language model from Meta built for long-horizon agentic work on local hardware. The architecture pairs a 52-layer causal text decoder with a roughly 1.8B parameter ViT-G/14 perception encoder for about 29.6 billion parameters in total, and it accepts interleaved text and image input so an agent can interpret screenshots, charts, and documents alongside conversation. The decoder uses grouped-query attention with 32 query heads and 2 key-value heads, a repeating pattern of three sliding-window local attention layers followed by one global layer, SwiGLU feed-forward blocks, and rotary position embeddings applied on the local layers, supporting a trained context of 131,072 tokens.

Meta describes the model as distilled from the larger Muse Spark and trained and evaluated around agentic behavior: end-to-end task completion, schema-accurate tool calling, multi-step reasoning across extended workflows, and recovery when a tool call returns an unexpected result. Reasoning effort is selectable across low, medium, high, and xhigh settings, and the model emits channel-scoped reasoning traces together with XML style tool calls rather than JSON, which requires parsers specific to this family. A companion block-diffusion drafter head predicts blocks of 16 tokens per forward pass for speculative decoding, with the main model verifying the proposals in parallel.