I’m always on the lookout for open-source AI that can actually hang with the big closed-source players like GPT-4, and I think we’re officially there. I just watched a video from an AI professional that completely blew me away with a new model from China called GLM-4.5.
This thing isn’t just a small step forward; it’s a giant leap. The YouTuber showcased its insane coding and agentic skills, and honestly, the demos are just wild.
✨ Jaw-Dropping Demos
The creator put GLM-4.5 through its paces, and it delivered big time. Here’s what I saw:
- 📌 The Rubik’s Cube Challenge: The expert got the model to create a fully interactive 3D Rubik’s Cube. But it didn’t stop there. He had it scramble the cube (up to a 10×10 version!) and then solve it perfectly, spitting out the entire move history.
- 📌 Pure-Thought Puzzles: Remember the Tower of Hanoi puzzle? The mind behind it prompted the model to solve the puzzle using “pure thought,” meaning it had to reason through the entire recursive logic before generating the code for a visualization. It solved a 10-disk version, which involves over 1,000 moves, without breaking a sweat.
- 📌 Interactive Worlds: This is where it gets crazy. Using simple prompts, the innovator had the model build all kinds of interactive tools right in the chat window. My favorite was a complete 3D solar system simulation. With a prompt like, “build an accurate 3D visualization of the solar system with lots of sliders for settings,” it created a stunning model with tooltips and controls to change planet size, orbital speed, and lighting. Just awesome.
He also had it build Flappy Bird, a 3D maze explorer, an interactive to-do board, and even a working Pokedex!
⚙️ What Makes GLM-4.5 So Powerful?
This isn’t just smoke and mirrors; the tech is seriously impressive. The creator broke it down for us:
- ✅ A Frontier Model: GLM-4.5 is a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model, which makes it incredibly efficient. It comes in two sizes, with the larger one being highly competitive.
- ✅ Top-Tier Performance: On key benchmarks for reasoning, agentic tasks, and coding, it’s right up there with GPT-4, Claude 3 Opus, and other top models. On the SWE-bench for coding, it’s shown to be more efficient than other recent open-source powerhouses.
- ✅ Hybrid Reasoning: It has a special “thinking mode” for complex tasks and a faster mode for simple requests, making it both powerful and responsive.
This feels like a game-changer. Having open-source models that can truly compete at the frontier opens up so many possibilities. I’m incredibly excited to see what people build with this.
For the full deep-dive and to see all these amazing demos in action, make sure to watch the original video from the creator. You have to see it to believe it!