GLM-4.5 Air
Shares rank 31 of 39 open-weight language models by recommenders
Free open-weight model that people run locally and rate highly for coding and general use. Some report weaker performance on certain tasks.
Free open-weight model that people run locally and rate highly for coding and general use. Some report weaker performance on certain tasks.
11 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 9
- criticize it
- 2
- approval share
- 82%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 9 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 4.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Runs locally and fits on hardware
“I've gotten great results out of glm-4.5-air which is 4.5 distilled down to 110B params which can fit nicely at 8 bits”
Comment from 23 Dec 2025 in “GLM-4.7: Advancing the Coding Capability” “you can also run something like GPT OSS 120B or GLM 4.5 Air locally.”
Comment from 7 Jan 2026 in “A 30B Qwen Model Walks into a Raspberry Pi and Runs in Real Time” “both easily fit and run incredibly fast”
Comment from 23 Dec 2025 in “GLM-4.7: Advancing the Coding Capability” Good results across tasks, including coding
“I limit myself to models with <144B params, then it's quite an enjoyable experience. GLM 4.5 Air has been great in particular”
Comment from 1 Dec 2025 in “DeepSeek-v3.2: Pushing the frontier of open large language models [pdf]” “I've gotten great results out of glm-4.5-air which is 4.5 distilled down to 110B params which can fit nicely at 8 bits”
Comment from 23 Dec 2025 in “GLM-4.7: Advancing the Coding Capability” “is fantastic all around (including coding)”
Comment from 10 Nov 2025 on Hacker News
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Performance drops on some tasks
“it delegates certain tasks to glm-4.5 air and that drops performance a ton”
Comment from 23 Dec 2025 in “GLM-4.7: Advancing the Coding Capability” “the community darling GLM-4.5-Air got 50%”
Comment from 2 Jan 2026 in “Dell's version of the DGX Spark fixes pain points”
Other open-weight language models people recommend
The four most recommended other open-weight language models, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen 3.8 27B | 1,173 | 426 | 73% | 13 | 2 mo32 owners | Approved |
| Z.ai GLM | 1,043 | 384 | 73% | 13 | 2 mo52 owners | Approved |
| Kimi | 931 | 359 | 72% | 13 | 1 mo26 owners | Approved |
| Gemma 4 | 713 | 249 | 74% | 13 | 1 mo14 owners | Approved |
| GLM-4.5 AirThis page | 9 | 2 | 82% | 5 | — | — |
What people said
10 of the 11 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“perhaps GLM 5 Air model is also around this size”
“worse than glm air 4.5 IMO”
“OpenRouter has free models (eg Z.ai: GLM 4.5 Air), I recommend those.”
“you can also run something like GPT OSS 120B or GLM 4.5 Air locally.”
“the community darling GLM-4.5-Air got 50%”
“both easily fit and run incredibly fast”
“it delegates certain tasks to glm-4.5 air and that drops performance a ton”
“I've gotten great results out of glm-4.5-air which is 4.5 distilled down to 110B params which can fit nicely at 8 bits”
“I limit myself to models with <144B params, then it's quite an enjoyable experience. GLM 4.5 Air has been great in particular”
“is fantastic all around (including coding)”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.