IBM Granite vs. GLM-5

IBM® Granite™ offers a collection of AI models tailored for business use, developed with a strong emphasis on trustworthiness and scalability in AI solutions. At present, the open-source Granite models are readily available for use. Our mission is to democratize AI access for developers, which is why we have made the core Granite Code, along with Time Series, Language, and GeoSpatial models, available as open-source on Hugging Face. These resources are shared under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, enabling broad commercial usage without significant limitations. Each Granite model is crafted using carefully curated data, providing outstanding transparency about the origins of the training material. Furthermore, we have released tools for validating and maintaining the quality of this data to the public, adhering to the high standards necessary for enterprise applications. This unwavering commitment to transparency and quality not only underlines our dedication to innovation but also encourages collaboration within the AI community, paving the way for future advancements.

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.