Snowflake CEO finds GLM-5.2 competitive with Opus 4.7 at a fraction of the cost
Snowflake compared GLM-5.2 and Opus 4.7 in a hands-on benchmark. The Chinese model held its own.
The test covered 103 tasks, each run three times, where models had to write code that works on both DuckDB and Snowflake. When each model got three attempts per task, the two were neck and neck: 66% vs. 67% of tasks solved.
Performance details
First-attempt accuracy diverges: Opus hit 53.7%, GLM only 47.6%, showing GLM’s output is less consistent. The Chinese model also averaged 99 runs per task versus Opus’s 80 and burned through 860 million tokens, nearly double Opus’s 439 million.
GLM’s strength is validating code reliably across both platforms (DuckDB and Snowflake) at the same time. According to Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, that’s why only GLM could solve certain tasks.
Its weaknesses are giving up too early and obsessively checking the wrong things. On one task, GLM fired off 411 tool calls in 24 minutes, checking row counts, distributions, null values, and column types, and still failed all three attempts. Opus solved the same task with 49 calls in 9 minutes.
The claim that GLM produces cleaner code did not hold up, Ramaswamy said. More checks do not lead to more correct results. Still, the team is excited about GLM-5.2 and wants to make it available to customers.
Price pressure on Western models
The results matter most in the context of price. GLM-5.2 costs $1.40 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens, according to Zhipu’s official price sheet. Some third-party providers undercut Zhipu’s price even further. Claude Opus 4.7 runs $5 input and $25 output. GPT-5.5 costs $5 input and $30 output.
| Model | Input | Cached Input | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLM-5.2 | $1.40 | $0.26 | $4.40 |
| Claude Opus 4.7 | $5.00 | $0.50 (Cache Hit) | $25.00 |
| GPT-5.5 | $5.00 | $0.50 | $30.00 |
| GPT-5.4 | $2.50 | $0.25 | $15.00 |
GLM’s higher token usage eats into that price gap somewhat. But Anthropic and OpenAI are facing serious pricing pressure, and right in coding, the flagship use case both Western AI labs are betting on.
If that pressure slows revenue growth, or worse, shrinks it, the already inflated AI market faces a real stress test. OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s valuations rest on the assumption that revenue keeps climbing fast. Those valuations are tied to billions in bets on AI infrastructure buildout, from data centers to chip orders.
What it means
Developers using coding agents will face a stark choice. GLM-5.2 is cheaper than Opus, but it wastes more tokens and takes longer to finish a job. Western companies relying on high prices to fund their growth now have a direct alternative that is significantly less expensive per output token.
