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Z.ai and their GLM models are pretty low quality.

I've been testing it for awhile now since it seemed to have potential as a local model.

With this new update it still cannot parse simple, test PDFs correctly. It inconsistently tells me that the value in the name field in the document is incorrect, and has the name reversed to put the last name first. Or that a date is wrong as it's in the past/future, when it is not. Tons of fundamental errors like that.

Even when looking at the thinking process there are issues:

I used a test website for it to analyze and it says that the sites copyright year states 2026 which is in the future and to investigate as it could be an attack, but right after prints today's correct date.

I'm in the process of trying to get it uncensored. Hopefully that will create some use out of z.ai

Edit: by the way, which is the best uncensored model at the moment?

I'e been using their models pretty much daily for the past 2 months to work on the codebase of a very complex B2B2C platform written in an unusual functional language (F#) with an angular frontend.

I also use Claude premium daily for another client, and i use Codex. and i can tell you that GLM5 is at this point much more capable than Claude and Codex for complex backend end work, complex feature planning, and long horizon tasks. One thing i've noticed is that it is particularly good at following instructions and guidelines, even deep into the execution of a plan.

To me the only problem is that z.ai have had trouble with inference : the performance of their API has been pretty poor at times. It looks like this is an hardware issue related to the Huawei chips they use rather than an issue with the model itself. The situation has been substantially improving over the past few weeks.

GLM5.1, GLM5-Turbo and GLM5v are at this point better than Opus, Codex, Gemini and other claude source models. We have reached a major turning point. To me, the only closed source model still in the game is codex as it is much faster at executing simple tasks and implementing already created plans.

Try GLM5v for your PDF work, it's their last generation vision model that has been released a couple of days ago.

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I still use GLM 4.7 for well defined coding tasks. I never got 5.0 to work satisfactorily, it felt like a hosting problem (z.ai) where it would work for a while then, for whatever reason, it couldn't respond to the context any more - but that's just a hunch.

I had no such trouble with 4.7 and find it fast and productive. Haven't tried 5.1; am using openAI models for coding most of the time.

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I do not know if it is good, because I have not tested it yet, but the most recent uncensored model is:

https://huggingface.co/trohrbaugh/gemma-4-31b-it-heretic-ara...

which was produced immediately after Google released their new Gemma 4 model.

>by the way, which is the best uncensored model at the moment?

There are no such models, depending on your definition of censorship. If you're referring to abliteration and similar automated techniques, they're snake oil.

Completely agree with this statement "Z.ai and their GLM models are pretty low quality." I have been trying out and it's kind of useless compare to SOTA models.
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I don't agree. I think their models are pretty good. The company's infrastructure though seems to be so so.