GLM-4.5 Air is Zhipu AI's efficient compact model — lighter and faster than GLM-4.5, making bilingual Chinese-English AI accessible at lower compute cost for production applications.
GLM-4.5 Air is an AI model released 2025 by Zhipu AI, a leading organization in large language model research. Lightweight GLM-4.5 variant — fast responses for everyday tasks with excellent Chinese language support. With a large number of parameters and a a large context window context window, GLM-4.5 Air is designed to excel across a range of demanding tasks — from software engineering and mathematical problem-solving to multilingual content generation and long-document analysis.
GLM-4.5 Air uses a dense transformer architecture with a large number of parameters of parameters, all of which are active for every input token. Dense architectures provide predictable, consistent behavior across diverse task types — there are no "cold" experts to warm up, and quality is uniform across prompts. Zhipu AI's training pipeline combined large-scale pretraining on a large-scale multilingual pretraining dataset with supervised fine-tuning and alignment techniques (RLHF or DPO), producing GLM-4.5 Air's characteristic balance of capability, helpfulness, and safety.
As of 2026-10-16, GLM-4.5 Air by Zhipu AI demonstrates measurable performance on standard AI evaluation benchmarks. On CMMLU — which tests world knowledge across 57 academic subjects from elementary to professional level — it achieves 77.4%. These scores place GLM-4.5 Air in a competitive position within its model class. Note that benchmark scores reflect controlled evaluation conditions; real-world performance varies by task, prompt design, and domain specificity.
The primary strengths of GLM-4.5 Air are: GLM-4.5 quality in a faster, more efficient deployment format; Good Chinese-English balance. These make it particularly well-suited for Speed-sensitive Chinese-English applications. Users working on complex, multi-step problems benefit most from GLM-4.5 Air's ability to maintain coherence across long inputs and produce structured, verifiable outputs.
Like all current AI systems, GLM-4.5 Air has limitations: Air variant trades quality for efficiency vs. full GLM-4.5; Less capable on complex reasoning compared to full-size GLM variants; Primarily Chinese-market optimized with uneven English performance. For production deployments, validating outputs against authoritative sources — especially for domain-specific or time-sensitive information — remains best practice. Zhipu AI continues to improve GLM-4.5 Air through ongoing research.
GLM-4.5 Air is available on LITHOVEX AI with a free account. Unlike direct API access — which requires billing setup, API key management, and per-token charges — LITHOVEX AI provides a seamless browser interface with no setup required, making GLM-4.5 Air accessible to students, researchers, developers, and early-stage teams globally.
As of 2026-10-16, GLM-4.5 Air by Zhipu AI demonstrates measurable performance on standard AI evaluation benchmarks. On CMMLU — which tests world knowledge across 57 academic subjects from elementary to professional level — it achieves 77.4%. These scores place GLM-4.5 Air in a competitive position within its model class. Note that benchmark scores reflect controlled evaluation conditions; real-world performance varies by task, prompt design, and domain specificity.
GLM-4.5 Air — efficient variant for faster inference
The training pipeline for GLM-4.5 Air involves multiple stages: large-scale pretraining on diverse multilingual text and code corpora to develop broad world knowledge, followed by supervised fine-tuning on instruction-response pairs, and alignment techniques such as RLHF or DPO. Each stage refines the model's helpfulness, accuracy, and safety. Zhipu AI's research team — based in China — has optimized GLM-4.5 Air for the specific capability profile described above.
Inference efficiency: GLM-4.5 Air is designed to deliver quality outputs at practical serving speeds. Its context capacity supports complex multi-turn conversations without quality degradation.
Getting started with GLM-4.5 Air on LITHOVEX AI takes under two minutes. Follow these steps:
For best results with GLM-4.5 Air: provide specific, context-rich prompts; include examples when generating code; specify output format when structure matters; break complex tasks into focused sub-questions.
Lightweight bilingual chatbots for Chinese-market apps
Efficient Chinese-English document processing at scale
Mobile AI integration for Chinese consumer applications
Cost-efficient API services with GLM quality
Chinese-language content moderation and classification
Zhipu AI (THUDM — Tsinghua University Data Mining Group) is a Beijing-based AI research company founded in 2019, spun out of Tsinghua University — China's top engineering institution. Zhipu AI developed the GLM (General Language Model) family, pioneering autoregressive blank infilling as an alternative to GPT-style pretraining. GLM-4 and GLM-5 models excel at bilingual Chinese-English processing, business document handling, and agentic tool-use workflows. Zhipu's commercial products include ChatGLM and CodeGeeX, widely adopted in Chinese enterprise. As of 2024, the company has raised over $400 million in funding and employs hundreds of researchers.
Funding: $400M+ raised
Founded: 2019, headquartered in China.
GLM-4.5 Air by Zhipu AI competes in a field with several strong alternatives. Below is a detailed side-by-side comparison against commonly listed alternatives, using benchmark data and capability profiles in the catalog.
Both GLM-4.5 Air and the models above are available free on LITHOVEX AI — test them side by side on your real tasks before committing to a subscription with any provider.
GLM-4.5 Air is released under Apache 2.0, which means you can download and run it on your own hardware. Below are the quickest ways to get started.
LITHOVEX AI runs GLM-4.5 Air on cloud infrastructure, so you can use it instantly in your browser without downloading anything, configuring drivers, or managing VRAM. Create a free account and start in under 60 seconds.
GLM-4.5 Air targets cost-conscious deployments in the Chinese market and Asian enterprise customers who need GLM's bilingual quality at efficient scale. Widely used for mobile and cloud applications where inference cost matters.
GLM-4.5 Air by Zhipu AI has the following version history and notable updates:
For the complete changelog and latest release notes, visit the official Zhipu AI model page.