How to Run GLM-5.3 Locally
Built from Z.ai's original weights with our own importance matrix. The calibration corpora behind our builds are public.
- GLM-5.3 keeps the GLM-5.2 base and takes every gain from post-training. Per Z.ai it is the most capable open-weights model for coding, with open-source SOTA on Terminal Bench 3.0 and Agents' Last Exam.
- You can now run GLM-5.3 in Atomic Chat with toggles for Low, High and Max thinking.
- The quants are still uploading and need a llama.cpp build with GLM-5.3 support; Atomic Chat runs it as support ships.
Highlights
- 753B parameters, read from the published weight index. Mixture-of-Experts: 256 routed experts with 8 active per token plus 1 shared, 78 layers, the first 3 dense.
- Same base as GLM-5.2. Z.ai state every gain comes from post-training, and the two checkpoints carry an identical parameter count.
- Coding: per Z.ai a 50% improvement over GLM-5.2 on their in-house Z.ai Code Bench, and open-source SOTA on Terminal Bench 3.0 and Agents' Last Exam.
- Emergent cyber capability: Z.ai report state of the art on CyberGym for vulnerability discovery, with gains largest further up the exploitation chain, more than doubling GLM-5.2 on exploitation benchmarks.
- Thinking budget controlled by
reasoning_effortwith three levels,low,highandmax. It defaults tomax. - Sparse attention with a learned indexer (
glm_moe_dsa, top-2048 index), and one multi-token-prediction block in the checkpoint. - Bilingual, English and Chinese.
- Ships in FP8 upstream, so our GGUF base is converted from the FP8 checkpoint rather than from BF16.
- Full imatrix quantization with our public calibration corpora.
These GGUFs are self-quantized from the original weights, not a repack. The importance matrix keeps low-bit quants closer to the full-precision model.
This is a 753B model. Even at four bits a full set of weights runs to several hundred gigabytes, and all of it has to fit in fast memory. In practice that means a large-RAM server or a serious multi-GPU rig, not a laptop and not most workstations.
Always pass
--jinjaso the GLM-5.3 chat template is applied. Z.ai note thatclear_thinkingdefaults tofalsein that template, so passclear_thinking=truefor chat scenarios.
Model Overview
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Base model | zai-org/GLM-5.3 |
| Parameters | 753B total, MoE with 8 routed experts plus 1 shared active per token |
| Layers | 78, the first 3 dense, 256 routed experts in the rest |
| Architecture | GlmMoeDsaForCausalLM, sparse attention with a learned indexer |
| Upstream precision | FP8 (e4m3, 128x128 block scales) |
| Vocabulary | 154,880 |
| Context length | 1,048,576 positions in the config; Z.ai evaluate up to 1M with context management |
| Languages | English, Chinese |
| Thinking | reasoning_effort: low, high, max. Defaults to max |
| This repo | GGUF quants (imatrix). The importance matrix we built is published here too |
Scores are Z.ai's published results for the base zai-org/GLM-5.3. Selected numbers from
their table: Terminal Bench 2.1 88.2, Terminal Bench 3.0 28.3, DeepSWE 1.1 66.9,
CyberGym 84.5, AutomationBench 48.2, HLE w/ tools 62.5, GDPval-AA v2 1769.
Choosing a quant
| Quant | Size | Notes |
|---|---|---|
AD-IQ2_M |
โ | Smallest usable. Aggressive low-bit for the tightest boxes. |
AD-IQ3_M |
โ | Beats Q3 at similar size thanks to imatrix. Best low-memory pick. |
AD-Q4_K_M |
โ | Recommended default. Best balance of size, speed and quality. |
AD-Q5_K_M |
โ | A step up when the memory is there. |
AD-Q6_K |
โ | Near lossless. |
AD-Q8_0 |
โ | Effectively lossless, reference quality. |
Sizes fill in once the quants finish uploading. Pick the largest file that fits your memory with room for context.
AD- marks an Atomic Dynamic layout: bits are assigned per tensor role rather than left
to a preset, with the router and the shared expert held high and the routed experts
carrying the compression.
Get started
GLM-5.3 uses the
glm_moe_dsaarchitecture. The quants in this repo are still uploading, and running them needs allama.cppbuild that has landed GLM-5.3 support. Until then, Atomic Chat is the easiest way to run it as support ships.
Run GLM-5.3 locally with:
- Atomic Chat: the easiest path. Open the app, search
AtomicChat/GLM-5.3-GGUF, pick a quant, hit Use this model. - llama.cpp:
llama-server -hf AtomicChat/GLM-5.3-GGUF:AD-Q4_K_M --jinja -c 8192 - Ollama:
ollama run hf.co/AtomicChat/GLM-5.3-GGUF:AD-Q4_K_M - LM Studio / Jan: search the repo id, download any quant.
For the original FP8 weights rather than GGUF, Z.ai list SGLang, vLLM, TokenSpeed, Transformers and KTransformers on the base model card.
Best practices
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| temperature | 1.0 |
| top_p | 0.95 |
| reasoning_effort | max for benchmark reproduction, low or high to spend fewer tokens |
| clear_thinking | true for chat |
From Z.ai's evaluation settings (HLE w/ tools). Per-benchmark settings vary; see the base model card for details.
Run in llama.cpp
git clone https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp
cmake llama.cpp -B llama.cpp/build -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF -DGGML_CUDA=ON
cmake --build llama.cpp/build --config Release -j --target llama-cli llama-server
./llama.cpp/build/bin/llama-server \
-hf AtomicChat/GLM-5.3-GGUF:AD-Q4_K_M \
--jinja -ngl 99 -c 8192 -fa on
How these were made
- Download
zai-org/GLM-5.3(original FP8 weights). - Convert to GGUF with a llama.cpp build that supports the GLM-5.3 architecture (
glm_moe_dsa, sparse attention with a learned indexer). - Build an importance matrix over our public calibration corpora.
- Quantize the ladder with
--imatrix, assigning bits per tensor role: router and shared expert high, routed experts carrying the compression.
License
Released by Z.ai (zai-org) under the GLM-5.3 license. Quantized by Atomic Chat.
Model tree for AtomicChat/GLM-5.3-GGUF
Base model
zai-org/GLM-5.3

