GLM 5.2 is open source and free to download. Running it is another story. At best it needs around 240 GB of memory, and that's only in its most compressed version. I have a US$4,000 DGX Spark dedicated to this, with 128 GB, and it doesn't have enough to even start. This isn't opinion, it's arithmetic. What bothers me isn't the model. It's the smoke from people shouting "free" who never opened a terminal.
Why does everyone say GLM 5.2 is free?
Because they mix up two different things. One is the license. GLM 5.2 shipped under the MIT license on June 13, 2026: anyone can download the weights, no payment, no permission. That's real and it's great.
The other is the cost of using it. Downloading the model costs nothing. Making it run at a usable speed costs money, and a lot of it. Both facts coexist, but the posts you see only tell you the first one. "Open weights under MIT" doesn't pull as many likes as "it's free and it beats the paid model."
What's the best free AI? The question is wrong
