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What is glm-4?

zai-org/glm-4 — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-06-22

7,076PythonAudience · developerComplexity · 4/5Setup · hard

In one sentence

GLM-4 is a family of open-source AI chat models by Zhipu AI with 9B and 32B parameter variants for text generation, coding, reasoning, tool use, and writing long research reports.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((glm-4))
    What it does
      Text generation
      Code execution
      Tool and API calling
      Research reports
    Model variants
      GLM-4-32B chat
      Z1-32B reasoning
      Z1-Rumination research
      Z1-9B lightweight
    Tech stack
      Python
      PyTorch
      vLLM
      Hugging Face
    Audience
      Developers
      ML engineers
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What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Run a 32B AI model locally for coding, Q&A, and tool-calling tasks

USE CASE 2

Serve GLM models via vLLM for production inference workloads

USE CASE 3

Use the smaller 9B model on limited hardware for math and reasoning tasks

USE CASE 4

Generate long research reports with the Rumination variant that searches the web during thinking

What is it built with?

PythonPyTorchvLLMHugging FaceOllamallama.cpp

How does it compare?

zai-org/glm-4arcee-ai/mergekitvt-vl-lab/3d-photo-inpainting
Stars7,0767,0777,073
LanguagePythonPythonPython
Setup difficultyhardmoderatehard
Complexity4/54/54/5
Audiencedeveloperresearcherresearcher

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1h+

Requires a GPU with sufficient VRAM, the 32B model needs significant hardware, the 9B is the minimum for most consumer GPUs.

So what is it?

GLM-4 is a family of open-source AI chat models built by the team at Zhipu AI. The models are designed to understand and generate text in multiple languages and can also work with images and other non-text inputs. The project contains several model variants released in April 2025, each aimed at different use cases and hardware constraints. The main model, GLM-4-32B-0414, has 32 billion parameters and was trained on 15 trillion tokens of text data. According to the README, its performance on coding and question-answering benchmarks is comparable to GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3, both of which are substantially larger. It handles tasks like writing and running code, calling external tools or APIs, answering questions from web search, and generating structured documents. A second variant, GLM-Z1-32B-0414, adds extended reasoning. It was trained with extra steps focused on mathematics, logic, and code so it can work through harder multi-step problems before giving an answer. A third variant, GLM-Z1-Rumination-32B-0414, goes further: it is designed for longer, more open-ended tasks like writing detailed research reports. It can search the web during its thinking process to gather information before composing a response. For users with limited computing resources, there is a smaller 9-billion-parameter option called GLM-Z1-9B-0414. The README notes it ranks near the top of open-source models at that size, particularly for math reasoning, making it a practical choice when running a full 32B model is not feasible. The repository includes Python code for running inference, notebooks demonstrating specific capabilities, and instructions for using vLLM to serve the models in production. Deployment guides for Ollama and llama.cpp are also provided. The models are hosted on Hugging Face and can be downloaded freely. A commercial API version is available at bigmodel.cn, and the models can be tested without downloading anything at chat.z.ai.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Using GLM-4-32B-0414, write a Python script that calls a weather API and returns the current forecast for a city I provide.
Prompt 2
Help me set up vLLM to serve the GLM-Z1-32B-0414 model on my Linux server and show me how to send a chat request to it.
Prompt 3
I want to run GLM-Z1-9B-0414 locally using Ollama. Walk me through the steps from the GLM-4 repo documentation.
Prompt 4
Using GLM-Z1-Rumination-32B-0414, generate a detailed research report on recent advances in battery technology.
Prompt 5
Show me how to run the GLM-4 inference notebook for multi-turn conversation with tool calling enabled.

Frequently asked questions

What is glm-4?

GLM-4 is a family of open-source AI chat models by Zhipu AI with 9B and 32B parameter variants for text generation, coding, reasoning, tool use, and writing long research reports.

What language is glm-4 written in?

Mainly Python. The stack also includes Python, PyTorch, vLLM.

How hard is glm-4 to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated hard, with roughly 1h+ to a first successful run.

Who is glm-4 for?

Mainly developer.

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