GLM 5.3 turned published-but-unshipped Firefox security fixes into working one-click exploits for six releases, at roughly $1,000 each.

Z.ai’s GLM-5.3 is the top open-weight model on Epoch’s Cyber ECI, scoring where the closed-weight frontier stood 6–7 months earlier.

AI model scores on Epoch AI's IKEA furniture assembly benchmark jumped from 28% to 80% in 10 months, with open-weight models trailing closed-weight models by about 7 months. Epoch AI's test of visual and spatial reasoning across 60 photos from three furniture builds.

Since January 2026, the most capable open-weight models have lagged frontier closed models by an average of four months, or 8 ECI points.

Can Chinese and open model companies compete with the frontier through e.g. distillation and talent?

Models that fit on consumer GPUs match the performance of frontier AI within a year or less.

The ratio of training data to active parameters in open-weight LLMs has grown 3.1x per year since 2022. Recent models LLMs have been trained with 20 times more data per parameter than the optimal ratio suggested by the 2022 Chinchilla scaling laws.

This Gradient Updates issue explores DeepSeek-R1's architecture, training cost, and pricing, showing how it rivals OpenAI's o1 at 30x lower cost.