GLM-5.3 Flash
GLM-5.3 Flash
A fast, MIT-licensed open model that human voters rank beside the big flagships.
Updated
The read
GLM-5.3 Flash is a sparse model of 320 billion parameters with 18 billion active, published under MIT with a million-token window and image, video and file input. It scores close to its larger sibling on both independent leaderboards while costing a tenth as much through the hosted API, and a faster FlashX variant runs at around 200 tokens a second. It is the most capable model in the index at this price with a licence this plain.
Where it shines
- MIT licence on a model close to the open frontier
- Fifteen cents in and fifty out per million tokens
- Reads images, video and files as well as text
Worth knowing first
- Trails GLM-5.3 on the hardest reasoning
- Hosted in China, with the data policy questions that brings
Index score
89.6
Provisional. This score is read from the product's public capability, not from the one-prompt rebuild the fully reviewed entries went through, so treat it as a placing rather than a verdict.
- Rank
- 05 of 73
- Builds
- LLMs
- Category
- Open weights
- Output
- MIT-licensed weights, plus a very cheap API
- Pricing
- Free tier
- Best for
- Fast, cheap agent and coding work on weights you control
Scores are our own editorial judgement, weighted craft 55, speed 10, control 15 and value 20.
Compare it with
Also worth a look
Full index- 06Xiaomi MiMo V2.6 ProMiMo V2.6 ProProvisionalThe strongest large open-weights model on the independent index, under MIT, for under a dollar out.Open weightsFree tier89.4
- 07DeepSeek V4.1 FlashDeepSeek V4.1 FlashProvisionalFrontier-adjacent answers for thirty cents per million input tokens, with the weights under MIT.Open weightsFree tier88.3
- 10GLM-5.3GLM-5.3ProvisionalThe same base as GLM-5.2, re-trained into one of the strongest open models available.Open weightsFree tier87.9
