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Z.ai

Z.ai: GLM 5.3 Flash

GLM 5.3 Flash Overview

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.

GLM 5.3 Flash Interactive Demo

Model settings

Thinking level

Max output tokens

Default 65,536 · max 65,536

Sign in to adjust thinking and output length per run.

Results appear here. Add an image or pick an example to run GLM 5.3 Flash.

GLM 5.3 Flash Details & Performance

Details

Resources

Vision Tasks

CaptioningChart Question AnsweringClassificationDocument Question AnsweringImage TaggingMulti-Label ClassificationOCRObject DetectionVision LanguageVisual Question Answering

Features

Foundation VisionLLMs with Vision CapabilitiesMultimodal Vision

Usage

Past 30 Days

Performance

Avg. Latency

GLM 5.3 Flash Vision Evals

Vision Evals is Roboflow's ground-truth benchmark: every model runs the same real-world samples across six vision tasks, and answers are scored against ground truth.

Evals updated September 5, 2026Pricing updated September 6, 2026

Overall score#33 of 53
66.3%
Avg cost / sample#4 of 53
$0.0002
Avg speed / sample#14 of 53
6.78s
Avg tokens / sample
2.4K

Strengths and weaknesses

GLM 5.3 Flash averages 66.3% across the six Vision Evals tasks, ranking #33 of 53 models overall.

Its weakest relative showing is Object Detection, ranking #46 of 53 at 33.1%.

At $0.0002 per sample it is the 4th cheapest of the 53 benchmarked models, and its average inference time of 6.8s per sample makes it the 14th fastest.

Performance profile

Field medianGLM 5.3 Flash

Field medians: Object Detection 53.9%, Counting 56.8%, Identification 84.4%, OCR 88.7%, Data Extraction 84.5%, Reasoning 54.1%.

Results by task

TaskScoreField (0 to 100)RankCost / sampleSpeed
Object Detection
33.1%
#46 of 53$0.00049.10s
Counting
55.4%
#30 of 53$0.00016.20s
Identification
84.4%
#23 of 53$0.00016.45s
OCR
90.6%
#21 of 53$0.00027.41s
Data Extraction
83.5%
#32 of 53$0.00014.78s
Reasoning (low)
51.0%
#29 of 53$0.00014.44s
Reasoning (high)
59.6%
#31 of 39$0.00015.38s
  • Thinking longer helps: 8.6 points higher on reasoning at high effort for 1.2x the cost and 1.2x the latency.

Price vs. performance

Score vs. cost

Overall benchmark score against estimated cost per sample, on a log scale. Upper-left is the sweet spot: high quality at low cost.

52 models on the current benchmark · scores and efficiency pooled across all six tasks at low effort · GLM 5.3 Flash highlighted

GLM 5.3 Flash scores are from a single run per task; a three-run re-run under the current protocol is pending · Methodology

View all Vision Evals →

GLM 5.3 Flash Pricing

GLM 5.3 Flash costs $0.075 per 1M input tokens and $0.250 per 1M output tokens.

Input$0.075 / 1M tokens
Output$0.250 / 1M tokens
Cached input$0.015 / 1M tokens

Pricing updated Sep 6, 2026

Alternatives to GLM 5.3 Flash

Other models worth comparing for similar use cases.

Qwen
Qwen3.8 Flash
Qwen3.8-Flash is a multimodal mixture-of-experts model from the Qwen team at Alibaba, and the production counterpart of the open-weight Qwen3.8-Flash-Next preview that introduces the architecture intended for the Qwen4 family. The main model carries 125 billion parameters alongside a separate 51 billion parameter N-gram embedding table, while activating roughly 6 billion parameters per token. It accepts interleaved image and text input and returns text, handling 262,144 tokens of context natively with extension to 1,000,000 tokens using YaRN. The production configuration runs with the 1M context window by default and adds built-in tool support.Four architectural changes separate it from earlier Qwen releases: hybrid attention that pairs Gated DeltaNet for history compression with Qwen Sparse Attention, which uses a lightweight indexer to select micro-blocks of context; a Gated Residual scheme; N-gram embeddings; and training with the Muon optimizer, refined around orthogonalization accuracy and the division of parameters between Muon and AdamW. Qwen reports training cost around one ninth that of Qwen3.7-Plus, with QSA attention kernels measured up to 7.6 times faster in prefill and 4.9 times faster in decode at 1M-token context. Reported scores include 58.7 on DeepSWE 1.1, 62.5 on SWE-bench Pro, 84.5 on AndroidWorld and 95.7 on MathVision.
Google
Gemini 3.7 Flash
Gemini 3.7 Flash is a proprietary multimodal model from Google, positioned in the Flash branch of the Gemini 3 series that trades some of the capacity of the larger Pro models for lower latency and lower cost per token. It accepts interleaved text and image input alongside other modalities handled by the Gemini family and returns text, and it continues the series pattern of exposing a configurable thinking budget so that reasoning effort can be scaled up for harder problems or reduced for high throughput extraction, routing and classification work. The model is announced roughly three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash, part of an unusually fast iteration cadence within the Flash line.Google reports gains concentrated in agentic coding and front end generation, citing a WebDev Arena Elo of 1588 for this release compared with 1538 for the preceding Flash model, and describes it as producing more functional layouts and more feature complete applications in fewer prompts. Weights are not published and the architecture, parameter count and training corpus are undisclosed, consistent with prior Gemini releases. Visual capability follows the Flash lineage, covering image and document understanding, chart and diagram interpretation, text recognition in images, and general visual question answering.
Qwen
Qwen3.8 27B
Qwen3.8-27B is a dense vision-language model of roughly 27.78 billion parameters from Alibaba's Qwen team, built on the architectural foundation established by the Qwen3.5 generation. It takes interleaved text, image, and video input through an integrated vision encoder and produces text, covering document and chart understanding, visual question answering, front-end code generation from visual references, and agentic computer-use workflows. The decoder is a hybrid stack of 64 layers that repeats a pattern of three Gated DeltaNet linear-attention blocks, each followed by a feed-forward block, then one grouped-query full-attention block, so only a quarter of the layers maintain a conventional key-value cache. Native context length is 262,144 tokens.Post-training targets long-horizon agentic work, and the model exposes per-request thinking control that lets callers switch reasoning traces on or off and choose a reasoning effort level. Multi-token prediction weights are trained alongside the main network for speculative decoding. Qwen reports improvements over Qwen3.6-27B on agentic and multimodal evaluations including Terminal-Bench 2.1, OSWorld-Verified, and SWE-bench Multimodal, with additional results on MathVision, CharXiv, and an internal Vision2Web suite.
OpenAI
GPT-5.6 Terra
GPT-5.6 Terra is the mid-tier reasoning model in OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family, which also includes the flagship Sol and the lightweight Luna. Introduced in a limited preview on June 26, 2026, and made broadly available on July 9, 2026, Terra accepts text and image input and produces text output, supporting vision, function calling, tool use, and agentic workflows. It is designed as a balanced option for everyday professional and production workloads — including coding assistance, document analysis, customer support, and multi-step agent tasks — where both output quality and cost efficiency matter. OpenAI positions Terra as delivering performance competitive with GPT-5.5 at approximately half the price, with a context window of around 1,050,000 tokens. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, Terra scores 84.3%, matching Claude Fable 5 on that benchmark. Under OpenAI's Preparedness Framework, Terra is rated High for cybersecurity and biological capabilities, meaning it demonstrates meaningful capability in those domains without reaching the Critical threshold.GPT-5.6 introduces a new naming convention in which the generation number (5.6) is paired with a durable capability tier name (Sol, Terra, or Luna), allowing each tier to advance on its own schedule. Terra carries the API identifier gpt-5.6-terra and supports the same reasoning effort controls available across the family, including adjustable reasoning depth. The model includes prompt caching with explicit cache breakpoints and a 30-minute minimum cache life, with cache writes billed at 1.25x the uncached input rate and cache reads receiving a 90% discount. GPT-5.6 Terra is a proprietary, closed-weights model served through the OpenAI API, Codex, and ChatGPT.
Anthropic
Claude Sonnet 5
Claude Sonnet 5 is a mid-tier large language model from Anthropic, released on June 30, 2026, as the latest model in the Sonnet series and a direct successor to Claude Sonnet 4.6. It is a hybrid reasoning model designed primarily for agentic workflows, software coding, and professional tasks. The model features a 1 million token context window, a 128k maximum output token limit, and runs adaptive thinking by default, giving API users fine-grained control over reasoning effort across five levels (low, medium, high, max, and extra-high). It uses an updated tokenizer shared with Opus 4.7 and later models, which produces approximately 30% more tokens for equivalent text compared to earlier Claude models. On benchmarks, Sonnet 5 scores 63.2% on agentic coding and 81.2% on OSWorld, narrowing the gap with Opus 4.8 while remaining at Sonnet-tier pricing.The model supports text and image input with text output, and accepts tools including browsers and terminals for autonomous multi-step task execution. Anthropic's safety evaluations report that Sonnet 5 shows a lower rate of undesirable behaviors than Sonnet 4.6 and is generally safer in agentic contexts, with improved resistance to prompt injection and reduced sycophancy. Cybersecurity safeguards equivalent to those on Opus 4.7 and 4.8 are active, though Anthropic notes the model was not deliberately trained on cybersecurity tasks. The model is proprietary and API-only, with no open weights.
Google
Gemma 4 31B
Gemma 4 31B is the largest dense model in Google's Gemma 4 family, built from the same research as Gemini 3 and released as open weights under the Apache 2.0 license. It supports a 256K token context window with text and image input, configurable thinking mode for step-by-step reasoning, and multilingual support across 140+ languages. The unquantized model fits on a single 80GB GPU.For vision tasks, Gemma 4 31B supports image understanding with variable aspect ratios and resolutions, and can output structured bounding boxes for UI element detection, making it useful for document parsing and UI understanding. Compared to Gemma 3, it delivers stronger reasoning and multimodal performance. It is part of a four-size family alongside the 26B A4B MoE variant and two on-device models (E2B, E4B), with the 31B dense variant optimized for output quality and fine-tuning over inference speed.

GLM 5.3 Flash License

MIT · Permissive license

GLM 5.3 Flash is released under MIT, a permissive license. The GLM 5.3 Flash license lets you use, modify, and sell work built on the model, with the copyright notice as the only real obligation and no requirement to open-source related code changes.

Commercial use
Permitted with no separate commercial license. No usage caps, revenue thresholds, or field-of-use limits apply to GLM 5.3 Flash.
Modification
Permitted. You can fine-tune or rewrite GLM 5.3 Flash and keep the result closed-source.
Redistribution
Permitted. Include the original copyright and permission notice in copies or substantial portions of the work.

MIT grants no explicit patent license and disclaims all warranties. If patent exposure is a concern for your deployment, review it with counsel before launch.

Read the full MIT license ↗

Do I need a commercial license for GLM 5.3 Flash?

No commercial license is needed for GLM 5.3 Flash: permissive terms let you keep related code private while deploying commercially.

Do not hesitate to reach out with questions for your commercial project — our team will help you start solving business problems on the first call. See Roboflow commercial licensing for the models included in each plan.

Talk to sales

This model is released under the MIT License, a short and permissive open-source license that allows commercial use, modification, and redistribution.

Yes. Under the terms of the MIT license, you can freely use this model for commercial purposes. You must retain the copyright notice and license text when redistributing.

License information is provided as a guide and is not legal advice.

Frequently Asked Questions About GLM 5.3 Flash Vision

Yes. GLM 5.3 Flash accepts image input and handles OCR, data extraction, object counting, identification, visual reasoning, and object detection. On Roboflow's Vision Evals its strongest task is OCR at 90.6% (#21 of 53 at low effort). You can test it on your own image in the demo above.

Yes. its transcriptions match the ground truth 90.6% on average (#21 of 53 at low effort) on Vision Evals OCR. Pulling specific fields out of documents (data extraction) scores 83.5%.

Not its strength. On Vision Evals, GLM 5.3 Flash scores 33.1% mAP@50 on object detection (#46 of 53 at low effort) and 55.4% judge-graded accuracy on object counting. For production counting or precise localization, pairing it with a specialized detector like RF-DETR or your own trained model in a Roboflow Workflow is usually more reliable: detect the objects, then count the detections.

On our benchmark's task mix, GLM 5.3 Flash averages $0.0002 per sample at $0.07 per 1M input and $0.25 per 1M output tokens (#4 of 53 on cost), with an average speed of 6.8s per sample across the benchmark. Actual cost depends on your images and prompts.

On the overall Vision Evals ranking, GLM 5.3 Flash sits #33 of 53 at 66.3%, just behind Claude Sonnet 5 (66.4%) and just ahead of Gemini 2.5 Pro (66%). See the full side-by-side: GLM 5.3 Flash vs Claude Sonnet 5.