GLM-5 vs. ERNIE 5.1

GLM-5 is Z.ai’s most advanced open-source model to date, purpose-built for complex systems engineering, long-horizon planning, and autonomous agent workflows. Building on the foundation of GLM-4.5, it dramatically scales both total parameters and pre-training data while increasing active parameter efficiency. The integration of DeepSeek Sparse Attention allows GLM-5 to maintain strong long-context reasoning capabilities while reducing deployment costs. To improve post-training performance, Z.ai developed slime, an asynchronous reinforcement learning infrastructure that significantly boosts training throughput and iteration speed. As a result, GLM-5 achieves top-tier performance among open-source models across reasoning, coding, and general agent benchmarks. It demonstrates exceptional strength in long-term operational simulations, including leading results on Vending Bench 2, where it manages a year-long simulated business with strong financial outcomes. In coding evaluations such as SWE-bench and Terminal-Bench 2.0, GLM-5 delivers competitive results that narrow the gap with proprietary frontier systems. The model is fully open-sourced under the MIT License and available through Hugging Face, ModelScope, and Z.ai’s developer platforms. Developers can deploy GLM-5 locally using inference frameworks like vLLM and SGLang, including support for non-NVIDIA hardware through optimization and quantization techniques. Through Z.ai, users can access both Chat Mode for fast interactions and Agent Mode for tool-augmented, multi-step task execution. GLM-5 also enables structured document generation, producing ready-to-use .docx, .pdf, and .xlsx files for business and academic workflows. With compatibility across coding agents and cross-application automation frameworks, GLM-5 moves foundation models from conversational assistants toward full-scale work engines.

ERNIE 5.1 is Baidu’s advanced large language model platform designed to deliver high-level reasoning, autonomous agent behavior, creative intelligence, and enterprise-scale AI performance while dramatically improving parameter efficiency and training cost optimization. Developed as the next evolution of the ERNIE model family, ERNIE 5.1 inherits the foundational capabilities of ERNIE 5.0 while reducing total parameters and active parameters to create a more efficient and scalable AI system capable of flagship-level intelligence. The model performs strongly across global AI leaderboards and benchmark evaluations for reasoning, world knowledge, mathematical problem solving, search capabilities, and agentic workflows, placing it among the top-performing AI systems internationally. ERNIE 5.1 introduces a disaggregated fully asynchronous reinforcement learning infrastructure that separates training, inference, reward systems, and agent loops to improve scalability, stability, resource utilization, and long-horizon task optimization. The platform also includes FP8 low-precision optimization, elastic resource scheduling, and reinforcement learning consistency improvements that reduce latency and improve overall model efficiency. Baidu developed a multi-stage reinforcement learning training pipeline centered on expert model specialization and on-policy distillation, enabling ERNIE 5.1 to combine capabilities in reasoning, coding, conversational AI, creative writing, and agentic tasks without performance degradation between domains. ERNIE 5.1 demonstrates advanced creative generation capabilities with strong contextual awareness, emotional understanding, narrative pacing, and stylistic adaptability that support storytelling, professional writing, and AI-assisted creative production.