6 ms·

What leads you to say China AI is giving up on open weights? I've been using GLM for over 6 months and pretty happy.

PunchyHamster 5mo ago
Why would any company release open weights once the investment money stops ? Releasing open weights have been basically a PR move, the moment those companies need to actually make money they will cut it out as that reduces their client base. They DO NOT want you to run AI. They want you to pay them to do it
- cyanydeez 5mo ago
  open weights is a way to nerf your opponent and is meaningless to your business if you need to retrain a model because your trailing So, it makes a lot of sense to get people a "demo" and claim the paid product is better. i think a lot of people have no idea how capable local models are atm.
  - jeremyjh 5mo ago
    Two years ago a lot of people thought GPT-4o was usable for software development. I didn’t really find that to be the case in general but certainly it could do a lot of useful things. And now Qwen3.5-8B is just as capable and runs fine on an M2 MacBook Air.
    - cyanydeez 5mo ago
      QWEN3.5 coder next runs to ~84k context before it poops out on AMD395+ w/128GB. Most of what it's good at is boilerplate find/replace/copy/paste; but being able to scaffold things out and touch up 20-30% of the code is pretty sweet.
      - jeremyjh 5mo ago
        There is no Qwen3.5 Coder. Are you talking about Qwen3 Coder?
- jhancock 5mo ago
  ok. maybe. I don't know. I'm asking how you know. z.ai did go public on the HK exchange. They are under pressures similar to other public companies. I know that China models are increasingly being trained and run using Huawei chips instead of Nvidia. I know China has a surplus of electricity from renewables (wind, solar, hydro).
- Zetaphor 5mo ago
  Minimax just released a new model yesterday. You're conflating one company with a countries entire industry. There's more than just Qwen coming out of China.
Zetaphor 5mo ago
People keep repeating this without any real thought behind it because of the high profile resignations on the Qwen team. Meanwhile the Minimax team just released a new open weights version of their 229B model yesterday. So much for that narrative. The AI landscape in China is larger than just Qwen and Alibaba.
- dns_snek 5mo ago
  Of course, but for how long? Do you think that companies will keep giving away valuable assets for free forever, or do you think that in the near future there's going to be an open weights model that's so good that people keep using it indefinitely instead of going back to frontier model providers? The first one is just incredibly naive, the second might be true for some people, for some tasks, but it's not going to capture the majority who're chasing the latest and greatest to "keep up".
  - Throaway199999 5mo ago
    the asset's value is in being released, so yes
    - dns_snek 5mo ago
      What does that mean?
      - Throaway199999 5mo ago
        Every time you release the models you even the playing field out for the competition, which ruins a lot of the advantage your bigger competitors had. It also lets smaller players work on the latest tech and then you can make deals with them.
  - bachmeier 5mo ago
    > Do you think that companies will keep giving away valuable assets for free forever If China is forced to choose between giving the entire AI market to the US or releasing free models, they'll be releasing free models as long as it's necessary.

Why would any company release open weights once the investment money stops ? Releasing open weights have been basically a PR move, the moment those companies need to actually make money they will cut it out as that reduces their client base. They DO NOT want you to run AI. They want you to pay them to do it

cyanydeez 5mo ago
open weights is a way to nerf your opponent and is meaningless to your business if you need to retrain a model because your trailing So, it makes a lot of sense to get people a "demo" and claim the paid product is better. i think a lot of people have no idea how capable local models are atm.
- jeremyjh 5mo ago
  Two years ago a lot of people thought GPT-4o was usable for software development. I didn’t really find that to be the case in general but certainly it could do a lot of useful things. And now Qwen3.5-8B is just as capable and runs fine on an M2 MacBook Air.
  - cyanydeez 5mo ago
    QWEN3.5 coder next runs to ~84k context before it poops out on AMD395+ w/128GB. Most of what it's good at is boilerplate find/replace/copy/paste; but being able to scaffold things out and touch up 20-30% of the code is pretty sweet.
    - jeremyjh 5mo ago
      There is no Qwen3.5 Coder. Are you talking about Qwen3 Coder?
jhancock 5mo ago
ok. maybe. I don't know. I'm asking how you know. z.ai did go public on the HK exchange. They are under pressures similar to other public companies. I know that China models are increasingly being trained and run using Huawei chips instead of Nvidia. I know China has a surplus of electricity from renewables (wind, solar, hydro).
Zetaphor 5mo ago
Minimax just released a new model yesterday. You're conflating one company with a countries entire industry. There's more than just Qwen coming out of China.

Zetaphor 5mo ago

People keep repeating this without any real thought behind it because of the high profile resignations on the Qwen team. Meanwhile the Minimax team just released a new open weights version of their 229B model yesterday. So much for that narrative. The AI landscape in China is larger than just Qwen and Alibaba.

dns_snek 5mo ago
Of course, but for how long? Do you think that companies will keep giving away valuable assets for free forever, or do you think that in the near future there's going to be an open weights model that's so good that people keep using it indefinitely instead of going back to frontier model providers? The first one is just incredibly naive, the second might be true for some people, for some tasks, but it's not going to capture the majority who're chasing the latest and greatest to "keep up".
- Throaway199999 5mo ago
  the asset's value is in being released, so yes
  - dns_snek 5mo ago
    What does that mean?
    - Throaway199999 5mo ago
      Every time you release the models you even the playing field out for the competition, which ruins a lot of the advantage your bigger competitors had. It also lets smaller players work on the latest tech and then you can make deals with them.
- bachmeier 5mo ago
  > Do you think that companies will keep giving away valuable assets for free forever If China is forced to choose between giving the entire AI market to the US or releasing free models, they'll be releasing free models as long as it's necessary.