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Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new GLM-series model and will release its weights

170 pointsby garo-protoday at 10:04 AM68 commentsview on HN

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ricardobeattoday at 12:07 PM

I had Ox Alpha working on coding tasks for a couple days non-stop, via OpenRouter and OpenCode Zen. It was able to complete tasks at a level that I'd put between Sonnet and Opus. It makes few mistakes, but is not that smart.

The main issue for me, is that it degraded into a doom loop several times. One of them was running the same bash command about a thousand times. The last model I've used that had this problem was Mimo 2.5, which is quite dated at this point. As a result of this, you cannot leave it unattended / not usable for agents.

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WithinReasontoday at 10:52 AM

Mixed signals, here it's performing below even GPT-5.4 Nano:

https://livebench.ai/

while here it outperforms Fable by a significant margin:

https://oxalpha.com/

but if the latter is true, will people still say it was "distilled" from Fable?

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harlan_pdxtoday at 11:31 AM

Releasing weights is the right move. Keeps them competitive with DeepSeek on the open side.

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esskaytoday at 10:49 AM

I'd be interested to know what was going on with it during the public test as there were numerous reports of it improving considerably at tasks it was asked to do early on in the test compared to later in it.

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SyneRydertoday at 12:05 PM

Rather than a pelican, for fun I showed it a couple of screenshots from Niu Lai and asked it to create an SVG inspired by the images. I explained a little about how the movie had been made by a mother & son team, initially derided but then went on to surprise cult box office success. It came up with this:

https://x.com/syneryder/status/2091978367579156569/photo/1

Created in a single turn - but technically not a "one-shot", because I gave it a tool to convert SVG to PNG so it could visualize what it had made. I asked it to keep iterating with tools during the same turn until it was happy.

I've also been using Ox Alpha for tasks that better resemble real work, and I'm really enjoying working with it. I've downgraded my Anthropic account so I can put some budget towards Ox Alpha instead, with the rumors that this one is going to be cheap. Opus & Fable are still better at getting large tasks / features done autonomously, but Ox Alpha can work autonomously too, and it's fun. I'm enjoying working with Ox in a way that I'm just not enjoying talking to the 5.0 Anthropic models. (As much as I don't want to say that, as someone with Claude /stickers on their laptop.)

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freakynittoday at 11:46 AM

It one-shotted generation of Java bindings for this project: https://github.com/jeffhajewski/latticedb

Related PR: https://github.com/jeffhajewski/latticedb/pull/5

The session used ~100K input tokens, ~60K output tokens, and ~80K thinking tokens.

I reviewed it using gpt-sol-medium, and it seems to be satisfied with it's work.

hypfertoday at 11:52 AM

> The company on Wednesday confirmed speculation that the Ox Alpha model is a new iteration of its GLM series and said it will release the weights for it tonight, in response to queries by Bloomberg News.

Where? And "Tonight" in which timezone?

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glimshetoday at 11:36 AM

There's a lot of brand confusion among the Chinese models right now. Kimi, Qwen, GLM, Z.ai, Ox. We might know the difference (or I should say, someone does because I'm losing track already) but these models have no chance at end user penetration and loyalty until there's a single focused survivor.

It took me a year talking about it until my wife knew that ChatGPT and Gemini are two different things.

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seydortoday at 11:22 AM

Funny how all china companies are expected to release weights by default

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garo-protoday at 10:04 AM

Unfortunately I can't find sources other than this for now but this seems to be legit.

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j_maffetoday at 10:41 AM

Anyone has a link to a report of its capabilities? I can't find a reliable source.

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xbmcusertoday at 12:19 PM

will we reach the singularity once the llm can be used to program the llm?

fen_wicktoday at 11:42 AM

Good to see more competition in the open weights space. The more players the better.

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toshtoday at 10:57 AM

my guess is this is a small model punching way above its weight

on toy benches it made quite a few mistakes but was able to fix all of them on its own

(meaning more tokens, more turns, more tool calls — but same outcome as gpt 5.6 sol)

dgellowtoday at 10:36 AM

Do we know the size of the model?

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respectattentiotoday at 11:26 AM

it's for sure better than deepseek flash 07/31

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kosolamtoday at 11:36 AM

Only reason people are interested is it’s free at the moment. I wasn’t impressed by its performance. Once the model gets a price tag it’s usage will be negligible.

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daveyoungtoday at 11:05 AM

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hncsiocp9xtoday at 10:51 AM

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