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DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash vs GLM-5

How DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (DeepSeek, September 2026) and GLM-5 (Z.ai (Zhipu AI), February 2026) are built, drawn on the same November 2026 blueprint. They make different choices on 10 of 27 components. Select a component in either diagram to find it in the table.

--- frontier-llm@2026-11+++ deepseek-v4-1-flash@2026-09+0~3−1

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash

DeepSeek, September 2026, 552B + 196B Engram total, 16B (8B in prefill) active

Text · code · tool outputText · code · tool outputImages · video · audioImages · video · audioByte-level BPE tokenizer — 128K–262K vocabByte-level BPE tokenizer128K–262K vocabVision / audio encoder — native ViT or encoder-free patchesVision / audio encodernative ViT or encoder-free patchesToken embedding — media embeds spliced in placeToken embeddingmedia embeds spliced in placeEngram n-gram memory — hashed 2–4-gram lookup (V4.1)Engram n-gram memoryhashed 2–4-gram lookup (V4.1)Residual streams — mHC: n = 4 mixed streamsResidual streamsmHC: n = 4 mixed streamsRMSNorm — pre-normRMSNormpre-normQK-Norm — per-head RMSNorm on q, kQK-Normper-head RMSNorm on q, kPartial RoPE / NoPE — rotate 64 dims, or nonePartial RoPE / NoPErotate 64 dims, or noneGated DeltaNet / KDA — linear · ~3 of every 4 layersGated DeltaNet / KDAlinear · ~3 of every 4 layersCED decoder attention (CSA2 over encoder-projected KV) — AttentionCED decoder attention (CSA2…AttentionCSA2 encoder layers (2× compression, Full + Reuse) — AttentionCSA2 encoder layers (2× comp…AttentionSliding-window attention — local · 128–1,024-token windowSliding-window attentionlocal · 128–1,024-token windowOutput gate + sink — σ(x·W_g) ⊙ o · learnable sinkOutput gate + sinkσ(x·W_g) ⊙ o · learnable sink⊕ residual⊕residualRMSNorm — pre-normRMSNormpre-normMoE router — σ / √softplus · bias balancingMoE routerσ / √softplus · bias balancingRouted experts — top-6–22 of 256–896 · SwiGLURouted expertstop-6–22 of 256–896 · SwiGLUShared expert — 1–2 · always activeShared expert1–2 · always active⊕ residual⊕residualFinal RMSNormFinal RMSNormLM head — untied · vocab logitsLM headuntied · vocab logitsDSpark drafter (trained after pretraining) — Input & outputDSpark drafter (trained after pretrain…Input & outputNext-token logitsNext-token logitsDraft tokensDraft tokensMuon optimizer — Newton–Schulz · QK-Clip · per-headMuon optimizerNewton–Schulz · QK-Clip · per-headFP8 → FP4 training — block-scaled FP8 · MXFP4/NVFP4 QATFP8 → FP4 trainingblock-scaled FP8 · MXFP4/NVFP4 QATLong-context extension — staged 4K → 1M · YaRNLong-context extensionstaged 4K → 1M · YaRNRL with verifiable rewards — GRPO family · async agentic RLRL with verifiable rewardsGRPO family · async agentic RLOn-policy distillation — reverse KL to specialist teachersOn-policy distillationreverse KL to specialist teachersSpeculative decoding — MTP self-drafting · DSparkSpeculative decodingMTP self-drafting · DSparkKV-cache compression — FP4 KV · cross-layer reuse · SSDKV-cache compressionFP4 KV · cross-layer reuse · SSD
AttentionMixture of expertsResidual & normInput & outputTraining & inferenceData flowResidual / skipAddedReplacedNot used

--- frontier-llm@2026-11+++ glm-5@2026-02+0~3−5

GLM-5

Z.ai (Zhipu AI), February 2026, 744B total, 40B active

Text · code · tool outputText · code · tool outputImages · video · audioImages · video · audioByte-level BPE tokenizer — 128K–262K vocabByte-level BPE tokenizer128K–262K vocabVision / audio encoder — native ViT or encoder-free patchesVision / audio encodernative ViT or encoder-free patchesToken embedding — media embeds spliced in placeToken embeddingmedia embeds spliced in placeEngram n-gram memory — hashed 2–4-gram lookup (V4.1)Engram n-gram memoryhashed 2–4-gram lookup (V4.1)Single residual stream — Residual & normSingle residual streamResidual & normRMSNorm — pre-normRMSNormpre-normRMSNorm on MLA latents (no per-head QK-Norm) — Residual & normRMSNorm on MLA latents (no per-head QK…Residual & normPartial RoPE / NoPE — rotate 64 dims, or nonePartial RoPE / NoPErotate 64 dims, or noneGated DeltaNet / KDA — linear · ~3 of every 4 layersGated DeltaNet / KDAlinear · ~3 of every 4 layersLatent attention (MLA) — global · GQA in many modelsLatent attention (MLA)global · GQA in many modelsSparse / compressed attn — DSA indexer · CSA / HCASparse / compressed attnDSA indexer · CSA / HCASliding-window attention — local · 128–1,024-token windowSliding-window attentionlocal · 128–1,024-token windowOutput gate + sink — σ(x·W_g) ⊙ o · learnable sinkOutput gate + sinkσ(x·W_g) ⊙ o · learnable sink⊕ residual⊕residualRMSNorm — pre-normRMSNormpre-normMoE router — σ / √softplus · bias balancingMoE routerσ / √softplus · bias balancingRouted experts — top-6–22 of 256–896 · SwiGLURouted expertstop-6–22 of 256–896 · SwiGLUShared expert — 1–2 · always activeShared expert1–2 · always active⊕ residual⊕residualFinal RMSNormFinal RMSNormLM head — untied · vocab logitsLM headuntied · vocab logitsMTP module(s) — predict t+2 … t+kMTP module(s)predict t+2 … t+kNext-token logitsNext-token logitsDraft tokensDraft tokensMuon optimizer — Newton–Schulz · QK-Clip · per-headMuon optimizerNewton–Schulz · QK-Clip · per-headINT4 QAT in SFT, FP8 rollouts — Training & inferenceINT4 QAT in SFT, FP8 rolloutsTraining & inferenceLong-context extension — staged 4K → 1M · YaRNLong-context extensionstaged 4K → 1M · YaRNRL with verifiable rewards — GRPO family · async agentic RLRL with verifiable rewardsGRPO family · async agentic RLOn-policy distillation — reverse KL to specialist teachersOn-policy distillationreverse KL to specialist teachersSpeculative decoding — MTP self-drafting · DSparkSpeculative decodingMTP self-drafting · DSparkKV-cache compression — FP4 KV · cross-layer reuse · SSDKV-cache compressionFP4 KV · cross-layer reuse · SSD
AttentionMixture of expertsResidual & normInput & outputTraining & inferenceData flowResidual / skipAddedReplacedNot used

Component by component

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash and GLM-5 differ on 10 of 27 components.

Blueprint componentDeepSeek-V4.1-FlashGLM-5

Same as the blueprintDeepSeek-ViT, trained from scratch: 32 layers, width 1,024, 16 heads, 14-px patches embedded by a linear projection, 2D-RoPE, RMSNorm and SwiGLU. A 3×3 pixel-unshuffle cuts visual tokens 9× before a 2-layer MLP projector maps them to 5,120 dims. Images only, up to about 1344×1344 px.

Not used

Same as the blueprintTwo Engram modules (196B parameters, FP8) at layers 1 and 14: n-gram orders 2–4, 8 hash heads per order, 2,048 dims per order, about 16M rows per head table. A sigmoid gate on each mHC stream's normalized dot product with its own key adds a shared value. The short causal conv was dropped. Rows are prefetched from host memory over RDMA.

Not used

Same as the blueprintSingle-Pass mHC: n = 4 streams of width 5,120 and 20 Sinkhorn iterations as in V4, but each sublayer reads its input with the mixing coefficients predicted by the previous sublayer. Removing that dependency lets the Mega-mHC kernel read and write the residual once, halving activation traffic, with negligible quality loss reported.

Single residual streamOne d = 6,144 residual stream with pre-norm sublayers; no hyper-connections in GLM-5 through GLM-5.3.

Same as the blueprintRMSNorm on the single 512-dim KV entry, which the report uses to bound every FP4 KV channel to about √512 ≈ 22.6, and on the 1,280-dim query latent. Unlike V4's reference code, V4.1's applies no separate per-head RMS normalization to queries.

RMSNorm on MLA latents (no per-head QK-Norm)Queries and keys are normalized as compressed latents (2,048 and 512 dims) before up-projection, not per head.

CED decoder attention (CSA2 over encoder-projected KV)Layers 20–39 take uncompressed global KV from the encoder's last hidden state and re-select with a hierarchical indexer.

Same as the blueprintMLA in all 78 layers and the MTP layer, with 64 heads: 2,048-dim query latent, 512-dim KV latent plus a 64-dim rotary key (576 cached values per token per layer), q/k head dim 256 (192 + 64 rotary), v head dim 256. This is the MLA-256 variant: head dim raised from 192 to 256 with one-third fewer heads, keeping training FLOPs and parameters roughly constant while lowering decode compute.

CSA2 encoder layers (2× compression, Full + Reuse)Layers 2–19: KV pooled 2→1 and computed in only 3 of 18 layers; the rest reuse that KV and its top-512 selection.

Same as the blueprintDSA in every layer, not alternated with MLA: a lightning indexer (32 heads × 128 dims, ReLU scores with learned per-head weights) selects the top 2,048 tokens per query and MLA attends only to those. It was added after mid-training: 1,000 warm-up steps on 14 × 202,752-token sequences, then 20B tokens of sparse adaptation. The indexer is frozen in RL and uses a deterministic torch.topk. GLM-5.2 runs it in 21 of 78 layers.

Same as the blueprintLayers 0–1 are pure sliding-window layers; every other layer adds the 128 most recent uncompressed tokens (SWA KV kept in FP8) to its sparse selection. SWA KV is never persisted: on a prefix-cache hit it is rebuilt by replaying only the last 128 tokens (SWA Bounded Replay), with negligible measured loss.

Not used

Same as the blueprintNo output gate. Each of the 64 heads has a learnable sink logit in the softmax denominator, per the reference inference code.

Not used

DSpark drafter (trained after pretraining)Three 128-token-window blocks draft 5 tokens per pass from the backbone's last 3 layers; no MTP loss in pretraining.

Same as the blueprintOne MTP layer (embedding and hidden-state norms, a projection, then an MLA + DSA + MoE block) whose weights are shared across 3 prediction steps in training. Acceptance length is 2.76 vs. DeepSeek-V3.2's 2.55 at 4 speculative steps. GLM-5.2 reuses the first step's top-k indices and KV in later steps and adds rejection sampling and an end-to-end TV loss: 4.56 → 5.47 accepted tokens at 7 steps in a GLM-5.1-based ablation.

Same as the blueprintThe release stores most weights in FP8 and routed experts in FP4. Post-training QAT extends FP4 to the main KV cache (E2M1 with one E4M3 scale per 16 channels and no global scale), indexer queries and keys stay FP4 as in V4, and the SWA KV stays FP8 because it is sensitive to quantization.

INT4 QAT in SFT, FP8 rolloutsINT4 quantization-aware training during SFT with a bitwise-identical kernel; FP8 inference for RL rollouts and release.

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