Two thirds of Z.ai's model repositories are older than 2025. One of them carries most of what is left of their traffic.

Z.ai keeps 154 model repositories on Hugging Face. Ninety-eight of them - just under two thirds - were published before 2025, and together they were downloaded 810,718 times in the last thirty days. That is eight per cent of the account's 10.08 million downloads. The fourteen repositories created in 2026 took 8.38 million, or eighty-three per cent. The surprise is how concentrated the remainder is. ChatGLM2-6B, published in June 2023, accounts for 435,810 of those downloads on its own - more than half of everything the pre-2025 archive collects, and more than the vendor's current GLM-5, GLM-5.1, GLM-5.3 or GLM-4.7 individually pull in the same period. A three-year-old six-billion-parameter chat model outranks four of the company's own flagships on the download counter. Size is the readable explanation. ChatGLM2-6B runs on a 6 GB graphics card at INT4 quantisation and holds about 8,000 tokens of conversation there; the 2026 flagships do not fit consumer hardware at all. The rest is inertia: tutorials, university course material and fine-tuning recipes written in 2023 still point at that repository by name. One caveat belongs with the numbers. Hugging Face reports downloads over a rolling thirty-day window only, so these figures describe present-day pulls, not lifetime totals - a model released last week and a model released three years ago are measured on the same month. wujec.ai has added profiles for ChatGLM-6B, ChatGLM2-6B and GLM-4-9B-Chat, the three models this history runs through.