Alpaca vs. GLM

Overview

Alpaca is an instruction-finetuned LLM based off of LLaMA.

The first of many instruct-finetuned versions of LLaMA, Alpaca is an instruction-following model introduced by Stanford researchers. Impressively, with only $600 of compute spend, the researchers demonstrated that on qualitative benchmarks Alpaca performed similarly to OpenAI's text-davinci-003, a significantly larger model.

Initial release: 2023-03-13

Reference

https://crfm.stanford.edu/2023/03/13/alpaca.html

Further Reading

Overview

GLM is Z.ai's open-weight model family for reasoning, coding, agents, and long-horizon work. GLM-5.2 is the current generation with a one-million-token context window.

The GLM family began with bilingual pretrained models and evolved through the ChatGLM and GLM-4 generations. GLM-5 scaled the mixture-of-experts architecture to 744B total parameters with 40B active parameters. GLM-5.2, released in June 2026, adds a stable one-million-token context window, stronger long-horizon coding and agent performance, adjustable reasoning effort, and efficiency improvements for sparse attention. Its weights are available under the MIT license.

Initial release: 2022-08-04

Current generation: GLM-5.2

Reference

https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.2

Further Reading

• https://z.ai/blog/glm-5
• https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.2
• https://huggingface.co/zai-org