GLM vs. Phi

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

Overview

Phi is Microsoft's family of compact open models designed for efficient local and edge deployment. Phi-4 is the current generation.

Microsoft introduced Phi-1 and Phi-2 to demonstrate how carefully curated and synthetic training data can make small models unusually capable. Phi-3 expanded the family for mobile and multimodal use. The Phi-4 generation includes a 14B general model and reasoning variants, plus smaller and multimodal checkpoints. Phi models are released under the MIT license and are designed for research, local inference, and resource-constrained production workloads.

Initial release: 2023-06-20

Current generation: Phi-4

Reference

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/phi

Further Reading

• https://huggingface.co/microsoft/phi-2
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11644
• https://huggingface.co/microsoft/phi-4