There are no viable free versions with sufficient computing power. The do-it-yourself AI is dangled as a carrot in front of users to camouflage the lock-in and rent seeking by Big AI. Go prove something new like Navier Stokes (replicating N-S itself no longer counts due to scraping and plagiarism) on your Mac Pro!
Paid influencers who perpetuate the open narrative are a whole new industry.
Even if there were open models, it is still IP theft and would not be "democratization" but "forced unpaid nationalization".
There is no lock in. Anyone with sufficient budget can download the weights for GLM 5.3. On OpenRouter, I count 29 different providers for this model [1].
In terms of purely local LLMs, one can run GLM 5.3 flash on a beefy workstation.
[1] https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.3