GLM-4.5 vs GLM-4.5-Air

Both GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5-Air are open-weights foundation models available at $0.00 direct API cost when self-hosted, or offered at identical baseline rates across major inference providers. Model selection depends on GPU deployment sizing and specialized benchmark performance rather than raw token price.

Both GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5-Air offer an identical context window of 131K tokens (~98k words). Both architectures provide equal capacity for large document ingestion, multi-file codebases, and extended multi-turn conversation histories.

GLM-4.5 scores 42% on SWE-bench Verified, while GLM-4.5-Air scores competitively for software generation. For complex autonomous debugging and agentic engineering, GLM-4.5 provides robust code generation and tool calling.

GLM-4.5 features native chain-of-thought extended thinking mode with configurable reasoning effort. In contrast, GLM-4.5-Air provides chain-of-thought reasoning depth for complex math and science.

GLM-4.5 generates approximately 75 tokens per second, while GLM-4.5-Air delivers 120 tokens per second. In latency-sensitive production environments, GLM-4.5-Air provides faster time-to-first-token (TTFT) and higher streaming response velocity.

Yes! Tiered multi-model routing can optimize for latency and accuracy: you can route high-frequency conversational turns and latency-sensitive queries to GLM-4.5-Air, and route deep architectural or complex reasoning queries to GLM-4.5. This balanced routing strategy maximizes system throughput and answer quality.