IMHO, cheaper inference means higher costs overall :) because everyone will use more thus driving up the investment required to stay current or to compete.

Switching models is also kind of easy but not plug-and-play. Most harnesses out there do very poor job with the open weight models. Unlike Opus, GLM 5.2 ends up in loops and hallucinates a lot more. If your harness is built on the expectation that the LLM will perform well, then switching to GLM 5.2 will be an uphill struggle. We had to refactor our harness and introduce more defences because of GLM.

The cost savings are substantial. Obviously it really depends on your workloads but it is noticeable cheaper for agentic work. Coding - I don't know. We do have some coding agents on GLM 5.2 and what I noticed with some landing page experiments that the results between GLM and Opus are identical - they might be using the same training data? Obviously Opus is still substantially better model. I don't think there is an argument to be made here but GLM 5.2 is cost effective and really good too.

Overall, we switched all of our internal agents to GLM 5.2 and because it is Open Weight we are in talks to get the model from certain geo locations giving us more freedom as well as extra protection.

Overall I think this industry will be in much better place because of GLM 5.2 and whatever open-weight models come next.