GLM-4.5 Air vs Qwen2.5 72B Instruct

Zhipu AI

GLM-4.5 Air is a lightweight variant from Zhipu AI's GLM-4 model family, designed for efficient deployments requiring lower inference cost while maintaining strong language understanding and generation capabilities. It targets cost-sensitive production workloads, API integrations, and applications where the full GLM-4.x series capacity exceeds requirements.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct is the flagship of Alibaba's Qwen2.5 series, a 72-billion-parameter open-weight model released in September 2024 after training on 18 trillion tokens spanning code, mathematics, and multilingual text. It offers strong generalist performance across coding, instruction-following, and structured reasoning while remaining fully open-weight under Apache 2.0 — a combination that made it a widely referenced model in open-source evaluations and community benchmarking. The 128K context window and built-in structured output support made it a common choice for document analysis and multi-step agentic pipeline development.