Tencent HY3 vs GLM 5.2: The Local AI That Wins at Half the Compute

Tencent just dropped HY3 — a local, open-weight AI model that ties one of its biggest rivals on the hardest science benchmark while burning about HALF the per-token compute. In this deep dive we break down exactly how it works, and how it stacks up against Zhipu's GLM 5.2. HY3 is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model: 295B total parameters, but only ~21B fire per token (192 experts, top-8 routing). It ships open-weight under Apache 2.0 on Hugging Face, runs on your own hardware — no API, no per-token bill — and packs an 80-layer transformer + a multi-token-prediction layer, grouped- query attention, a 256K context window, and a selectable thinking dial. But "local" has an asterisk... and so does GLM 5.2. We cover the real hardware cost (≈590 GB in BF16, an 8-GPU node), the benchmarks (GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench), the efficiency gap (21B vs 40B active), GLM's million-token context, and finally the verdict: which one should YOU actually run. ⚠️ Note: benchmark figures are approximate / vendor-reported, and some hardware numbers are back-of-envelope calculations, not official specs. Take vendor benchmarks with a grain of salt. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 A local AI that ties a giant at half the compute 0:22 What "local" really means — open weights, Apache 2.0, your hardware 1:01 Sparse Mixture-of-Experts: 295B total, only 21B active 1:36 Under the hood: 80 layers, MTP, grouped-query attention, 256K context 2:18 The catch: ~590 GB and an 8-GPU H20 node 3:12 Meet the rival: GLM 5.2 (Zhipu, 750B, 1M context) 3:56 The efficiency gap: 21B vs 40B, GPQA & coding benchmarks 5:04 GLM's own asterisk: a million-token context that's mostly theoretical 5:31 The verdict: which model should you run? 6:05 Recap & what's next 🔗 LINKS HY3 (Hugging Face): https://huggingface.co/tencent/Hy3 GLM 5.2 (Hugging Face): https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-5.2 vLLM: https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm SGLang: https://github.com/sgl-project/sglang #LocalAI #HY3 #GLM #MixtureOfExperts #OpenSourceAI #Tencent #LLM #Hunyuan