1st October 2025
Two new models from Chinese AI labs in the past few days. I tried them both out using llm-openrouter:
DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp from DeepSeek. Announcement, Tech Report, Hugging Face (690GB, MIT license).
As an intermediate step toward our next-generation architecture, V3.2-Exp builds upon V3.1-Terminus by introducing DeepSeek Sparse Attention—a sparse attention mechanism designed to explore and validate optimizations for training and inference efficiency in long-context scenarios.
This one felt very slow when I accessed it via OpenRouter - I probably got routed to one of the slower providers. Here's the pelican:

GLM-4.6 from Z.ai. Announcement, Hugging Face (714GB, MIT license).
The context window has been expanded from 128K to 200K tokens [...] higher scores on code benchmarks [...] GLM-4.6 exhibits stronger performance in tool using and search-based agents.
Here's the pelican for that:

Recent articles
- My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit - 14th March 2026
- Perhaps not Boring Technology after all - 9th March 2026
- Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code? - 5th March 2026