GLM-5.2 vs MiniMax-M3: Opus Has REAL COMPETITION (Model Stacking)

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• Benchmarks open-weight models GLM-5.2 and MiniMax-M3 against Opus 4.8 and lightweight Qwen3.6-35B
• Finding: each pricing tier down is roughly 5x cheaper while only marginally less capable
• Introduces a three-tier model stack — state-of-the-art, workhorse, lightweight
• Open weights provide substitutability/resilience if proprietary models get deprecated; true local ownership still needs ~$50-100k in GPU hardware
• Takeaway: “Don’t pick a model — pick a MODEL STACK”