Just found this LLM that claims to be more ethical due to “Funds humanitarian causes” and using “16X” less energy, among other claims and says it was built by 2 Syrian engineers. These all seem pretty cool but has anyone heard of this before and know if any of this is true? cause it seems a bit too good to be true
They say it’s built on GLM-4.5 Air, which is a 106B/12B active parameter Chinese open weight model from Z.ai. It definitely requires less hardware to run than an OpenAI frontier model, but the 24Wh/query number they’re comparing against for chatGPT is way higher than anything I’ve ever heard before. The 1.5Wh/query they claim for Thaura is also weirdly high actually.
Did they do anything to it? Who can say. It sounds like they might just be running GLM-4.5 Air straight. There are lots of places you can get that. You can run it yourself if you have an Apple silicon Mac with 128gb RAM. It’s even one of the free tier models on openrouter.ai.
It’s not going to be useless (I actually think the most promising future of LLMs is improvement on the low end, even a 30B can be coerced into producing useful code and is legit awesome at translation and things like image recognition), but it’s not a frontier model by any stretch.