# Z.ai Releases GLM-5.3-Flash Multimodal Model

> Z.ai, the lab formerly known as Zhipu, has released GLM-5.3-Flash, its first GLM-5 model built to handle images and video alongside text from the ground up. Under the hood it is a mixture-of-experts design with 320 billion total parameters but only about 18 billion active at once, paired with a one-million-token context window and a hybrid attention scheme that mixes sparse and linear approaches to keep costs down. The pricing is the aggressive part. Z.ai is offering input tokens at 0.075 dollars per million through September 9, well under its own list price, and the model reportedly scores 57 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at roughly 0.045 dollars per task. The weights are open on Hugging Face, which continues a pattern of Chinese labs shipping capable multimodal models cheaply and openly. For developers weighing frontier performance against budget, releases like this keep tightening the gap with the big Western labs.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: Eesel AI · Published Wednesday, September 2, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Z.ai, the lab formerly known as Zhipu, has released GLM-5.3-Flash, its first GLM-5 model built to handle images and video alongside text from the ground up. Under the hood it is a mixture-of-experts design with 320 billion total parameters but only about 18 billion active at once, paired with a one-million-token context window and a hybrid attention scheme that mixes sparse and linear approaches to keep costs down. The pricing is the aggressive part. Z.ai is offering input tokens at 0.075 dollars per million through September 9, well under its own list price, and the model reportedly scores 57 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at roughly 0.045 dollars per task. The weights are open on Hugging Face, which continues a pattern of Chinese labs shipping capable multimodal models cheaply and openly. For developers weighing frontier performance against budget, releases like this keep tightening the gap with the big Western labs.

## Source

[Read the full story at Eesel AI](https://www.eesel.ai/blog/glm-5-3-flash)

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