In the article, they claim GLM used almost half the tokens 131,000, and the cost is about a quarter. For the cost to be the same GLM would have to use 4-5 times more tokens.

By how much? At least TFA provided numbers for one example, and they disagree with you (by a lot).

I ran a fairly large experiment last week, and the token usage wasn't bad at all. What softs of use cases are you seeing large token usage by GLM 5.2?

> are you seeing large token usage by GLM 5.2

the statement isn't "GLM 5.2 has large token usage", it's "GLM 5.2 has large token usage vs modern Opus".

I haven't used it, but this wouldn't surprise me. I see ~30% lower token usage for better results with Opus 4.8 vs 4.6 (and i had great results with 4.6)

I'm comparing with GPT5.5 on Codex and it's not even a competition. GLM takes way longer and eats a lot of tokens getting work done, it's easy to rack up a big bill on openrouter. I tried the $20 plan from ollama, too, and ate through half a month of budget in a few hours and blew my daily limit twice and still had to get codex to complete it -- which it did with only 10% of my monthly limit remaining.

GLM is promising but it's pretty costly, all things considered.