4 ms·
I was surprised that GLM 5.1/5.2 are not vision models - they are text input only. That's actually pretty uncommon these days. All of the OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemi
by simonw 4mo ago
I was surprised that GLM 5.1/5.2 are not vision models - they are text input only.
That's actually pretty uncommon these days. All of the OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini models accept images, and so do the other leading open weight families - Gemma 4, Qwen 3.6, Kimi 2.x.
In GLM's case image input would be useful because it's a model that scores very highly for tasks like web design, but without image input it can't take a screenshot and output HTML+CSS.
Don't get me wrong, GLM is a phenomenal model, but the image thing is a bit of a gap.
- _pdp_ 4mo agoI don't see this being such a big gap. There are some use-cases for sure but apart from UX/UI work it is not really needed. Besides, none of the frontier models can replicate actual images - the can approximate at least in my own experience.
- simonw 4mo agoOne of my tests for a new model is dumping in a screenshot of a web page and seeing if it can recreate it from scratch in HTML and CSS. Even the local models I run on my Mac are getting surprisingly good at that now.
- kamranjon 4mo agoa pretty fun and quick tests i do with vision models is to screenshot the hackernews homepage and ask the model to return a json representation of the screenshot - qwen 3.5 0.8b did surprisingly well at this.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- tiahura 4mo agoUsing llms to generate docx. Being able to rasterize and review is an important part of the process.
- ashenke 4mo agoI had the same reaction with Deepseek V4 ! It would be more useful as a vision model
- 0xbadcafebee 4mo agoConfigure a subagent in your coding harness to spin up a new sub-session with any vision model for those tasks and feed the result back to the main model. No need for "one model that does everything"
- WASDx 4mo agoAre you suggesting it should summarize the image in text or generate it in HTML or something else?
- ricardobeat 4mo agoThat doesn’t work well in a lot of scenarios. The text LLM doesn’t know what to look for in an image before it sees a description, you might need multiple rounds of back and forth.
- jarjoura 4mo agoVision decoding outside of the latent space of the model is lossy, but claude opus's vision isn't that great outside of UI screenshots. I mean it works in a pinch. At least in my testing, if you're looking at non UI images, there are better image to text models that can turn into a very precise documents that any LLM can easily parse.
- x3cca 4mo agoI've been using Google ai studio as a free vision bridge. Gemma 31B is dummy capable at vision and at 1500 rpd its basically unlimited.
- abby3010 4mo agoAgreed, that's actually one step that will make people adopt it widely for customer facing AI Agent!