Zhipu AI
Zhipu AI develops GLM-4 Flash, a lightweight open-weights reasoning model available at zero cost. Their GLM architecture combines autoregressive pre-training with a latent reasoning module. Zhipu AI provides free API access to GLM-4 Flash through their platform, making it one of the most accessible frontier reasoning models globally.
Why Choose Zhipu AI?
GLM-4 Flash uses a hybrid architecture combining autoregressive language modeling with a latent reasoning chain that generates intermediate representations before producing final answers. Their training pipeline uses curriculum learning that progressively increases reasoning complexity from basic arithmetic to multi-step logical deduction. GLM-4 Flash achieves 79.8% on AIME 2024 and 97.3% on MATH-500 through their specialized mathematics pre-training corpus. The model uses grouped-query attention with 128K context window support.
Pricing Overview
GLM-4 Flash is permanently free via Zhipu AI API. No credit card required. Self-hosting requires 670GB INT4 VRAM for the full model or smaller distilled variants for consumer GPUs.
Official Model Portfolio (1)
| MODEL | CONTEXT | INPUT $/1M | OUTPUT $/1M | SPEED | FREE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GLM-4 Flash | 128K | $0.00 | $0.00 | 100 tok/s | Yes |
⚡ Verified Free Tier & SDK Drop-In
Credit Card Required: No
import OpenAI from "openai";
const client = new OpenAI({
baseURL: "https://open.bigmodel.cn/api/paas/v4",
apiKey: process.env.ZHIPU_API_KEY,
});⚖️ Top 3 Competitor Alternatives
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|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek | Open Weights & Frontier Research | No | deepseek-r1, deepseek-v3 | View → |
| Alibaba Qwen | Open Weights Leader | Yes | qwen-2.5-coder-32b, qwen-2.5-72b | View → |