@adlrocha - AI Independence Day

For six days, the most popular model on OpenRouter was completely anonymous. If you are following the space, you probably know who I am referring to. It was called ox-alpha, a free model with a million-token context window that nobody knew who was behind it. Some people were theorising that it was another K3-sized Chinese open model, or maybe a new model from Xiaomi’s MiMo family (Xiaomi had done before this trick of going anonymous in OpenRouter before a release). Users were handing it fifty-hour porting jobs and coming back impressed by the result. The space was going crazy, Bloomberg wrote it up twice about the mode (so even the widespread media was taking about it), Hacker News front-paged it…And on Wednesday Z.ai decided to make it public and announce that ox-alpha was GLM-5.3-Flash, the smaller version of the model I wrote about last Sunday.There’s a funny story behind this release. Turns out that someone had already doxxed the model four days before Z.ai’s announcement. Someone…