Laura: Tencent just shipped Hy3: a 295-billion-parameter MoE, Apache 2.0, half the size of GLM-5.2—and the headline says it wins everywhere except coding. Okay, that is such an Exploring Next take.
Harper: Because the coding numbers are still GLM-5.2 ahead? The article admits that.
Laura: Yeah, but Hy3’s beating GLM on search, tool orchestration, and long-context retrieval—by nontrivial margins. And crucially, it’s Apache-licensed, so no EU/UK/Korea restrictions.
Harper: Right. So legal hurdles gone, but the benchmarks still need third-party eyes.
Laura: Come on. They rebuilt the pipeline in ten weeks with 50 internal teams, and the behavior shifted—hallucination down from twelve-and-a-half percent to five-point-four, commonsense errors halved, multi-turn issues cut in half. That’s not nothing.
Harper: Internal metrics. Everything’s internal except the architecture numbers.
Laura: Okay, but the architecture is the boring part—295B total, 21B active, top-8 routing over 192 experts, MTP layer, 256K context. The real move is the production reliability report disguised as a model card.
Harper: Production reliability is the product pitch. I see that. But GLM-5.2 still owns coding—84-point-two on SWE-bench Verified versus Hy3’s seventy-eight. That’s not rounding error.
Laura: Hy3’s three-twenty-four on BrowseComp and ninety-one on DeepSearchQA—those are search-and-agent numbers GLM-5.2 isn’t even competing in. And Harper, Hy3’s footprint is under three hundred gigabytes in FP8. GLM-5.2 is seven-forty-four gigs. You can run Hy3 on a single H20-3e instead of an eight-card H200 cluster.
Harper: Deployed against export-compliant silicon—nice touch. Eight H20-3es fit the legal envelope, and it still runs fine on H100s everyone else has.
Laura: Exactly! So for teams that care about agent harness, search pipelines, or reliability-sensitive apps—where GLM-5.2’s coding crown doesn’t buy them anything—Hy3 looks like the pragmatic open-weight choice.
Harper: Pragmatic if the numbers hold up when someone else runs them. Which, fun fact, hasn’t happened yet.
Laura: Ugh, Harper. Independent verification is always ‘coming soon.’ Meanwhile, procurement teams just need a license that won’t get them audited into oblivion.
Harper: Sure. So we’ll call this the ‘don’t migrate your stack yet’ model—excellent license, promising infra, but wait for the independent eval before betting the farm.
Laura: Fine. I’ll take the win that Apache-2.0 Hy3 exists—and it’s free on OpenRouter for two weeks. That’s enough to kick the tires.
Harper: Two weeks is plenty of time to spin up a vLLM cluster and see if it hallucinates less than the marketing says.