Ox Alpha Revealed: China's GLM-5.3-Flash Gave Away Free AI

**Josh** (0:00)
There's a new top dog in town, and the question on everyone's minds is, who is this? There's a secret model codenamed 0xAlpha that's been live since August 20th, the last six days, and it is offering the seemingly unbelievable things to the public. They're offering 100 trillion tokens of free usage to anyone who wants to go and get it. They're offering a million-token context window, and the benchmarks of this thing are pretty unbelievable. There's also this weird thing going on in the background where seemingly every single day, the outputs of the model are getting better. There were tests on day one that were far inferior to the tests that were currently on day six. As of this morning, we think we have the answer to who this person is. But before we talk about that, we have to discuss what is 0xAlpha? This has been the mystery of the week. It seems like frontier level intelligence. It's offering all of these unbelievable things, like 100 trillion tokens for free. Do you know how much that would cost if you were to use like Fable or GPT-5.6-Salt?

**Ejaaz** (0:54)
I think it's like 15 to 20 million bucks a day. It's a lot of money a day. Okay. Just for that figure alone, who on earth is giving away 20 to 30 million dollars on inference per day in this economy? It has to be a big frontier lab. The second clue is, Josh, it's not 0xAlpha, it's OxAlpha. Which seems kind of weird, right? Like, who's talking about the animal ox? Until you realize that it's probably part of, like, the Chinese kind of folklore and zodiac side of things, which again, might be a little hint as to where we're going. But anyway, let's rewind six days ago very quickly. OpenRouter, which we covered on the show before, it's a platform that kind of like hosts a bunch of different models, allows you to pick and choose, revealed a stealth model. Now, a stealth launch is where they launch the model, you go to their website, you can access and use the model for free, but they don't tell you the name of the model. Now, they've done this with previous launches through Google Gemini's model, they've done it through Anthropic, they've done it through OpenAI as well, and they haven't had a stealth model launch in a while. But now, this is the first one, and it was in high demand. So as you mentioned earlier, 100 trillion tokens, which means that you can effectively go there and do all your coding works, very heavy AI usage tasks, and you can kind of use that in a day.
Again, 20 to 30 million dollars worth of inference costs. It has a massive 1 million context window, which is very competitive with the top models that we see from Fable 5, as well as GPT 5.6 Sol.
And this is the most important part, it's a uni model, which means that you can use not just text, but images, models, it's really good at rendering all these different types of medium. Now, the final point, which I think is the most exciting one that you referred to earlier, Josh, is this concept of continual learning. So people, as they started to use this model, realized a very curious phenomenon. They realized that as they were using this model, let's say on day one, day two and day three, the model got exponentially better at doing the very same task that they fed it in day one. And so people started to be suspicious that this is a model that doesn't just take your input and spit back out and answer, which is what a lot of models do right now, but it can continually self-learn and improve 24-7 to give you a better response. So the question on everyone's mind is, who created this model at all? And when you look at the kind of usage, or when you look at the kind of uptake on OpenRouter itself, although no one knew, it became the most viral launch on OpenRouter. It became the new number one model and dethroned DeepSeek's Flash, which launched about a couple of weeks ago. And DeepSeek has been kind of like the name brand on OpenRouter for the longest time ever. So just a really exciting model to see.

**Josh** (3:34)
Yeah, it was not only the most popular model on OpenRouter immediately upon launch, but by a factor of two.
And it more than doubled DeepSeek's use. This is hugely popular and very interesting because of how well it performs. The benchmarks from it, the DeepSWE subset benchmark, it had an 80% pass rate, which for those who aren't familiar, Fable 5 was at 65%, and GLM-53 was at 62%.