GLM-5.3 vs InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview

GLM-5.3

A large coding and long-horizon agent model with a 1M-token context, several tool calls per turn and three reasoning budgets. Z.ai's smallest build is 756 GB in FP8, so it needs an 8-GPU server, Z.ai's API or a provider. The main risks are no published safety work, no way to report a flaw, and thinking that can't be turned off.

InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview

An image and video reader on gpt-oss-20b with an optional thinking mode, a preview untouched for over a year. It needs about 51 GB in BF16, since OpenGVLab publishes no quantised build, and runs in Transformers and vLLM. The main risk is a chat template in the Transformers-format repository that doesn't match its tokenizer, with no safety results.

GLM-5.3

1. Start it with vllm serve zai-org/GLM-5.3 --kv-cache-dtype fp8 --tensor-parallel-size 8 --speculative-config.method mtp --speculative-config.num_speculative_tokens 5 --tool-call-parser glm47 --reasoning-parser glm47 --enable-auto-tool-choice --served-model-name glm-5.3 (vLLM 0.28.0 or later, 8xH200 or 8xH20 per vLLM's recipe)
2. Use the glm47 tool-call and reasoning parsers in vLLM or SGLang; SGLang's cookbook says glm45 leaves the calls as plain text
3. Pass chat_template_kwargs: {"reasoning_effort": "low"} for short tasks; anything other than low or high falls back to max
4. Pass clear_thinking: true in chat use, since the template keeps earlier reasoning by default
5. Don't send enable_thinking: false; the template ignores it and always opens a think block
6. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output is documented only for Z.ai's hosted API
7. No Z.ai build fits a 128 GB machine; the full 1M context needs 8xB200 per vLLM's recipe

InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview

1. Serve with vllm serve OpenGVLab/InternVL3_5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview-HF --max-model-len 32768, which is our command; the card gives none for vLLM
2. Check the rendered prompt before relying on it, since the shipped template's <|im_start|> markers aren't tokens in the gpt-oss tokenizer; the GitHub-format repository's harmony template is the alternative
3. Use Transformers 4.55.0 or later, as the card requires for this size
4. For thinking, send the card's thinking system prompt and parse the reasoning out of the <think> tags, with temperature 0.6 and sampling on as the card advises
5. Keep inputs within 32K tokens, the length it was trained at, whatever the config says