GLM-5.3-Flash GGUF — Quantized by BatiAI

320B parameters. 18B active. MIT licensed.

Quantized from Z.ai's official weights. Korean output and tool calling verified on every quant — captured transcripts below, including the tier most likely to break.

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⚠️ Read this first — you need a specific llama.cpp build

glm5next is a new architecture and is not in mainline llama.cpp yet. Stock builds, Ollama and LM Studio cannot load these files today.

git clone https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp && cd llama.cpp
git fetch origin pull/27752/head:pr27752 && git checkout pr27752
cmake -B build && cmake --build build -j

We will publish Ollama tags once the PR lands in mainline.

📦 Sizes and measured speed

Split into 48 GB shards because Hugging Face caps a single file at 50 GB. Download every shard of a quant — llama.cpp opens -00001-of-0000N and finds the rest.

_{llama-bench -ngl 0 -n 16 -r 1 on 2× Intel Xeon Gold 6442Y (48 cores / 96 threads, 503 GB RAM). CPU only, no GPU offload — the honest floor, not a best case. On Apple Silicon's unified memory these go up substantially; we publish those numbers only once measured on the actual hardware.}

Why generation speed barely moves across tiers: only ~18B of 320B parameters are active per token (288 experts, top-8), so at -ngl 0 you are bound by compute on the active slice, not by reading the whole file. Pick the tier by the RAM you have, not by expected speed.

✅ Verified — every quant, including the lowest

Captured output (Q4_K_M, temp 0)

**서울**: 서울은 대한민국의 수도로, 600년 역사를 지닌 고궁과 전통 한옥이 현대적인
마천루와 K컬처 속에서 어우러진 매력적인 도시입니다.
**김치**: 김치는 배추, 무 등의 채소를 고춧가루, 마늘, 젓갈로 양념해 발효시킨 한국의
대표 발효 음식으로, 건강식으로서 전 세계적으로 사랑받고 있습니다.
**비빔밥**: 비빔밥은 따뜻한 밥 위에 각종 나물과 고기, 계란을 올려 고추장과 함께...

[Tool call, raw from /completion]
</think><tool_call>get_weather<arg_key>city</arg_key><arg_value>부산</arg_value></tool_call>

Why Q2_K matters here. With no importance matrix (see below), the lowest tier is where damage would appear first — and in Korean before English. It did not: 0 Han characters, 0 kana, and a correct tool call. That is the tier that fits a 128 GB machine, so it is the one we checked hardest.

🔧 Tool calling works — but tool_calls will be empty

GLM-5.3 emits tool calls in its own XML-ish format, not the JSON that llama.cpp's OpenAI-compatible endpoint knows how to parse:

<tool_call>get_weather<arg_key>city</arg_key><arg_value>부산</arg_value></tool_call>

So /v1/chat/completions returns tool_calls: [] even though the model behaved correctly. This is a parser gap in llama.cpp, not a defect in these files — we confirmed it by reading raw /completion output, quoted above.

Until llama.cpp adds the format, parse it yourself from the content:

import re
m = re.search(r"<tool_call>(\w+)((?:<arg_key>\w+</arg_key><arg_value>[^<]*</arg_value>)+)</tool_call>", text)
if m:
    name = m.group(1)
    args = dict(re.findall(r"<arg_key>(\w+)</arg_key><arg_value>([^<]*)</arg_value>", m.group(2)))

Run the server with --jinja — without it the model's own chat template is not applied and tool prompting degrades.

🧪 imatrix — what it took, and which quants have it

IQ3_XXS and IQ2_XXS are imatrix-quantized. The K-quants (Q4_K_M, Q3_K_M, Q2_K) are not — they were built first, before we had a working importance matrix. Here is the honest history, because the failure is more useful to you than the success.

Our first attempts all died at the same tensor:

collect_imatrix: non-finite values detected in blk.7.attn_v_b.weight

Four configurations on PR #27752: head 8a8d0bc, rebased head 20de496, GPU attention with -ot exps=CPU, and a build with attn_k_b/attn_v_b pinned to F32. blk.7 is one of the 11 MLA layers (the other 34 are KDA linear attention). The weights were fine — we decoded the tensor from the BF16 conversion and got nan=0, inf=0, absmax=0.104 — and inference was fine, so the fault was in the graph, not the file.

Re-converting with PR #27754 fixed it. Same weights, same corpus, no non-finite values. The two PRs also use incompatible metadata schemas (#27754 wants a per-layer attention.head_count_kv array), so you cannot just swap runtimes on an existing file — the conversion has to be redone.

One more practical note: the re-converted BF16 is 584 GiB and our machine has 468 GiB of RAM. Running imatrix directly on it would re-read the shortfall from disk every chunk — we measured that path at roughly 63 hours for 200 chunks. Going through a Q8_0 intermediate (310 GiB, fits in RAM) brought it down to about four.

Calibration corpus

Korean OCR labels, Korean technical prose, source code, and English wikitext. Run with --chunks 200.

_{We report composition as measured numbers because we once wrote "mixed code + English + Korean}

• Chinese corpus" on our cards and later measured that corpus at 0.51% Korean. Numbers, not adjectives.

⚖️ License — MIT, genuinely

The base model is MIT. No revenue thresholds, no separate license for assistant products, no gated form. That is unusual at this scale and worth stating: unlike some frontier open-weight releases, you can ship this in a commercial product.

🚀 Usage

hf download batiai/GLM-5.3-Flash-GGUF \
  --include "GLM-5.3-Flash-Q4_K_M-*" --local-dir ./glm53

./llama-server -m ./glm53/GLM-5.3-Flash-Q4_K_M-00001-of-00004.gguf \
  -ngl 0 -c 8192 -b 512 -ub 512 -np 1 --jinja --port 8080

Budget tokens for reasoning. This model always opens with <think> — its chat template has no enable_thinking switch, and passing one is silently ignored. A three-sentence Korean answer used ~1,700 characters of reasoning at Q4_K_M before any content appeared. Give max_tokens room or you will get an empty content and mistake it for a broken quant. We made exactly that mistake and nearly discarded a good file over it.

IQ2_XXS needs more room than the rest — use max_tokens 12,000+. At 4,000 it failed our gate with 0 characters of content and 5,555 of reasoning. We re-ran it and found the model was fine: a short question ("한국의 수도는?") answered in 97 characters with 66.0% Hangul and zero Han characters, and tool calling worked. On the longer prompt it had already written all three sentences inside its reasoning, then went back to polish them — 15,822 characters, ending in "Let me refine:" — and ran out of budget before emitting anything. Self-revision gets longer at 2 bits. Give it room and it answers.

📋 What is not here

• Vision — see below.
• Ollama tags — blocked on PR #27752 landing in mainline.
• Vision — GLM-5.3-Flash is natively multimodal, but PR #27752 is text-only. We have not converted or verified the vision tower, so we do not ship it.
• Apple Silicon speeds — we publish only numbers measured on the actual hardware.

✨ What BatiAI did differently

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Who we are. BatiAI builds on-device Korean AI. BatiFlow runs chat, speech-to-text, document OCR and speaker diarization entirely on a Mac. Full line: huggingface.co/batiai