Zhipu AI launches and open-sources the "Niulai" model GLM-5.3-Flash, enhancing multimodal capabilities and inference cost efficiency.

TechFlow reported that on August 26, Z.ai released GLM-5.3-Flash, describing it as the first native multimodal model in the GLM-5 series. Featuring 320 billion total parameters and 18 billion activated parameters, it outperforms GLM-5.2 across multiple coding, agent, and vision benchmarks, and approaches Claude Opus 4.8 on certain coding tasks. GLM-5.3-Flash employs a hybrid architecture combining sparse and linear attention, and introduces mechanisms such as mHC and IndexPool to reduce long-context inference costs and KV cache overhead.

Z.ai stated that the model has been deployed at scale on China's AI chip clusters, achieving a threefold improvement in end-to-end service performance compared to the initial baseline. The model weights have been publicly released on Hugging Face.