Zhipu co-founder Tang Jie has again hinted that GLM-5.3 is close, replying "sooooooon" on X when asked when the new version would arrive. The teaser extends a warm-up campaign that has been building for weeks. In late June, Tang publicly asked what the next GLM version should add, and developers most strongly called for visual capabilities (image understanding features). In July, developers were already discussing GLM-5.3 directly, prompting Tang to answer, "Are you ready? Haha." More recently, community members found that a search engine had at one point indexed a glm-5.3 branch in the Z.ai Java SDK (software development kit) and related wording on a ZCode page, adding to expectations that the next GLM release is getting closer.