Just 4 weeks ago the "Kimi K3 moment" was seen as a threat to Closed AI and in less than a month Z.ai have cut the parameter/RAM barrier to a third.
Congratulation to Z.ai and all the hard working Chinese researchers who are quitely boiling the frog.
GLM 5.2 has token efficiency problems. It's not a stupid model, but it takes a lot of "thinking" to produce not-stupid results. ("But wait...").
Which makes its pricing deceptive.
I tried to get by through the month of June on just GLM 5.2 and it was ... fine-ish for about two weeks. But the provider situation wasn't ideal.
(We do know GPT5.6 have adopted the caveman shorthand, which explains its token efficiency).
I do occasional experiments where I cancel or downgrade that and try to live on open models only and it just never works out financially or skills wise. There's nobody offering K3 etc at rates that end up being significantly cheaper.
Yet.