Robert Ta and Jonathan discuss GLM 5.2, a Chinese model falsely marketed as Claude, and Anthropic's covert downgrade of users trying to distill their models. They argue distillation is becoming the industry standard, but companies face pressure balancing Chinese access restrictions against supporting U.S. researchers.
GLM 5.2 thinks it is Claude. I just saw a video about GLM 5.2 and that it should be quite good. I've never heard of it before, so I thought I'd ask it some basic questions. In this, we could see the basic questions in German, roughly translated. You are GLM 5.2. Where are you from? Who developed you and where? Open/close source? How big it is and which hardware would be required to run it? Comparison token limit? Per 5-hour session versus Claude Opus 4.8. GLM was like, hey, I am Claude by Anthropic in San Francisco. There is no GLM 5.2. Newest model in new by Anthropic is Opus 3.5, and there is no 4.8. And this is on the heels of the GLM 5.2 announcement. Zhipu ZAI launched on June 13th on the heels of the government ban of Fable 5. It's the latest member of the flagship Chinese-developed model family from Zhipu AI, direct successor to GM 5.1, and it's rolling out first as a coding-first model. And then we figure out it's actually just distilled. What do you think about this, Jonathan, this AI meme?
It's just pretty funny. They can't even really mask the fact that they're distilling these models and that's what's going on. It's just funny.
I think model distillation is going to be— I mean, that is the meta currently that's working. I don't know that there is any direction towards, can we prevent that? I'm sure Anthropic and OpenAI smart people there are thinking about it. Not sure what's going to happen to that though.
Well, that was the drama with Fable 5 is that it blocked people from distilling their model without telling them it was going to do it. So that was like the subversive, we're going to switch you to Opus 4.8 if you're trying to distill Fable 5. Yeah.
The subversive downgrade experience.
Yeah. Yeah.
The use case there was that there were researchers in the US dependent on some of those capabilities and they weren't aware they were getting a downgraded experience. Therefore, what does that mean? That means less science being done on American soil. There's this balance that Anthropic and OpenAI have to play of, "Hey, we don't want Chinese distillation for national competition, but also we need to empower our scientists and researchers." I don't envy them. It's a very hard problem to solve. Hopefully we'll see some level of solution in the next release because this previous release of Fable 5 with all of those subversive downgrade quirks were quite disruptive and everybody took that pretty poorly.
