📆 ThursdAI - GLM 5, MiniMax 2.5, Seedance 2, Gemini 3 Deep Think, Codex Spark 100tps & more AI news

Quick Overview

The ThursdAI episode focused heavily on the explosive return of open-source LLMs, highlighted by the simultaneous releases of GLM 5 from Z.ai and Minimax 2.5, both models competing closely with frontier models like Claude Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro on key benchmarks, alongside the mind-bending video generation model Seedance 2 from ByteDance.

Key Points: GLM 5, released by Z.ai, claims the open-source coding crown and features 744 billion parameters with only 40 billion active, utilizing a DeepSeek sparse attention mechanism. Minimax 2.5 achieved 80.2% SWE Bench verified, claiming state-of-the-art coding performance, and operates with only 10B active parameters, emphasizing speed and efficiency. Lou from Z.ai stated GLM 5 is 'bigger, faster, better, and cheaper,' introducing a new asynchronous reinforcement learning framework called SLIM. Olive Song from Minimax attributed their rapid scaling to their RL framework, Forge, focusing on training speed, stability, and balancing inference speed with tool-calling efficiency. The panel expressed excitement over the cost performance ratio, noting Minimax 2.5 is significantly cheaper than Opus 4.6 for similar task completion rates. Alex Volkov highlighted Seedance 2 from ByteDance as a personal excitement, noting its ability to shatter reality limits in character consistency, physics, and sound, though difficult to access without a Chinese phone number. Minimax's team is highly AI native, with one colleague treating agents as interns to collect feedback and improve skills, demonstrating advanced internal AI utilization.

Context: The ThursdAI episode hosted by Alex Volkov of Weights & Biases, alongside co-hosts Wolfram Ravenwolf and Ryan Carson, provided a rapid news update focused almost entirely on major breakthroughs in open-source AI models immediately following releases from major labs the previous week. The show featured live interviews with key researchers from Z.ai (Lou) regarding GLM 5 and Minimax (Olive Song) regarding their newly dropped Minimax 2.5, establishing a direct comparison between the leading open-weight models and proprietary frontier models.