DeepSeek V4.1 Flash vs GLM 5.3 Flash

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is a sparse mixture-of-experts model from DeepSeek, and the first built on the company's Causal Encoder-Decoder (CED) architecture. It activates 8B parameters on input and 16B on output from a 552B-parameter backbone, an asymmetric split that keeps per-token compute low relative to the model's total size. Image understanding is native to the architecture, with visual and text embeddings trained jointly from the start of pre-training rather than added afterward as in the earlier experimental V4 Flash Vision Exp.

GLM-5.3-Flash is a native multimodal model from Z.ai. It is suited for efficient coding and long-horizon agent tasks. Its hybrid sparse and linear attention architecture maintains accurate long-context behavior while reducing compute overhead.