GLM 5.3 Flash vs Qwen3.8 Max

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.

Qwen3.8 Max is the flagship tier of Alibaba's Qwen3.8 family, a sparse mixture-of-experts multimodal model with roughly 2.4 trillion total parameters of which about 95 billion activate per token, which keeps serving cost and latency well below what the total parameter count would imply. It builds on the architectural foundation established by Qwen3.5 and accepts text, images, video, and documents as input while producing text output. Reported context handling reaches close to one million tokens, with a maximum generation length of 131,072 tokens, so the model is aimed at long-horizon agentic work such as repository-scale coding, multi-step research, data analysis, and office document workflows.

For vision work the model performs image and video understanding, document and chart interpretation, text recognition inside images, and grounded visual question answering, and Alibaba reports gains concentrated in multimodal and agentic evaluation categories rather than general reasoning. Published figures include 86.6 on Terminal-Bench 2.1, 67.7 on SWE-bench Pro, 93.0 on PaperBench, 82.8 on IFBench, and 92.6 on GPQA Diamond. It is the first model in the Max tier of the Qwen line for which the team states weights will be released publicly, alongside a smaller Qwen3.8 27B checkpoint. No training or safety model card has been published.