Perplexity Fine-Tuned a Chinese AI Model to Match Claude Opus 4.8 at One-Third the Cost - Decrypt

In brief

Perplexity released a research preview of a post-trained GLM 5.2 version, built to act as an orchestrator inside its Computer harness and escalate to Claude Opus 4.8 only when needed.

The system costs one-third the price of Opus 4.8 across benchmarks.

It's Perplexity's second Chinese open-source fine-tune in 18 months—the first being R1-1776, a version of DeepSeek R1 stripped of roughly 300 Beijing-mandated censorship topics.

Perplexity has turned a Chinese open-source model into a near-frontier workhorse at roughly a third of what Claude Opus 4.8 costs.The company released a research preview today of a post-trained version of Z.AI’s GLM 5.2, built specifically to operate inside its Computer agent harness and available now in production.