7 ms·

This is going to age very poorly when the best Chinese labs ALREADY just started not open sourcing their models. Qwen 3.7 is not open source; previous Qwen ver

by jychang 3mo ago

This is going to age very poorly when the best Chinese labs ALREADY just started not open sourcing their models. Qwen 3.7 is not open source; previous Qwen versions would have open source releases, but Qwen 3.7 plus does not. The second best Chinese model, Minimax M3, is testing the waters by taking longer and longer between “model release” and open sourcing it. This time, they spent 2 weeks after release before open sourcing it. There’s also a lot of rumors of GLM and Deepseek not open sourcing future models. It’s pretty obvious that you cannot take Chinese models as open source for granted, they’ll be closed source soon.

ls612 3mo ago
The main reason the Chinese labs are releasing models as open weights is because they don't have the compute necessary to provide all of the inference. For the US frontier models something like 80-90% of the lifetime compute required for the model is inference rather than training. China wants to shepherd as much of their limited compute as possible towards training to keep up in the race.
- londons_explore 3mo ago
  With nearly everyone using inference accelerators, the pool of hardware is no longer shared between training and use.
- SubiculumCode 3mo ago
  No, they are open sourcing them because they don't have another play, being second/3rd tier lans
- Slartie 3mo ago
  I think the main reason is to minimize the market for closed-source models from US companies. China knows that doing what Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/... are doing is impossible for them. No one outside of China in any sane condition will send their data to compute farms IN CHINA like people currently do with US-based frontier models. Even if they could muster the inference power. Hence they do the second-best thing possible to attack the dominance of the US-based corporations: reduce their moat by open-sourcing models that are not fully equal, but practically useful and good enough for easily 90% of typical tasks people use agents for in their daily lives. But way cheaper to run. As long as this arms race in AI continues, China as "number two" will have some incentive to continue open-sourcing models. But of course the US government might force a change if they continue to enforce limited public access to new frontier models - there is no market to minimize if a model is not allowed to be publicly available.
  - Barbing 3mo ago
    Ya. You know enough about China to know: would they be willing to sell users outside of China models that aren't fully pro-China (and won't deflect on tough questions)? Or would that be dirty money that they wouldn't want anyone to make? Like if they could release Ch-ythos 6 tomorrow BUT it had Western ideals, would they take the fame, clout, attention, & profit, or stick to the party line? (hope the monolithic brush is appropriate, considering, I mean it's an impressive system/country even if I have my own strong preferences - also I've taken as true reporting about their models deflecting etc. on sensitive topics)
    - rvnx 3mo ago
      Sounds perfect, sell it to me. I use LLMs for health, design and programming. If you want to make a political or religious pamphlet it’s not a single LLM that you should base yourself on. No matter where it comes from.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 3mo ago
    I'm European and I don't see sending my data to China as more risky than sending it to the US. Rather the opposite. I think your vision of how the rest of the US sees the world is tinted by a massive bias.
    - wongarsu 3mo ago
      As a private citizen, yes. But at work the calculus is entirely different. There is already lots of exposure to US companies (guess where our emails and tickets life), so the increase in espionage risk from adding another American company is small. Not zero, and trust towards AI companies is limited. But adding the first Chinese company to send data to would be a major risk. One nobody would sign off on, given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information
      - rvnx 3mo ago
        > given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information Quite funny because if you use that phrase verbatim except swapping China with the US it could actually fit. Good governments try to do things that are in the interest of their population, and yes it could mean opposite interests to your/someone else governments. No reason to blame US, Israel, China, Russia, etc. They just defend their piece of cake.
zardinality 3mo ago
[dead]
csomar 3mo ago
The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose) and glm (coding) and they are both open weight and share lots of their tooling. There are lots of AI companies and it doesn’t seem that they all have the same funding fountain or share monetization goals. I wouldn’t read much into what each one of them is doing.
- tw1984 3mo ago
  > The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose) DeepSeek is developed by the largest Chinese hedge fund, their models used to make them $ on the share market are very profitable, they've never ever released anything on those models. Somehow you are claiming that those same group of people are going to totally change their very consistent long term behaviour and start promoting openness when they are in the global leading position in AI?
  - hurtigioll 3mo ago
    selling LLMs is much more profitable than trading, and with much less risk
    - fn-mote 3mo ago
      > much more profitable I think you made this up. Right now, I don’t believe any LLM company is profitable at all. Unless you meant “more profitable” to mean “not-as-badly-negative profit”.
- Barbing 3mo ago
  Had seen weeks back that the top two non-Western models on ArtificialAnalysis were both closed: https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence-category-tabs https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence-category-tabs How much stock should we put into that graph, though, I'm not sure.
- sameersri2004 3mo ago
  Even if the models by the Chinese labs are open source or open weights even after they get to mythos level intelligence lets say, still inference and the optimization of those models to be accessed at speeds of 1000 tokens/sec in not in the hands of general public as these models have parameters more than a trillion and they can't be run on some publicly available hardware, So even after being open source it does'nt fix the problem as the general public will still pay the company for inference.
roenxi 3mo ago
If we're measuring progress in hours and days then yes. But if we're measuring progress in months then OSS models are doing fine. You can get a state-of-the art performance in an open model if you pretend it is January 2026 instead of June. There is no evidence here that the cutting edge labs have any durable advantage. Extrapolating current trends it seems likely that even the Europeans will be capable of meeting any given performance measure with enough time. In fact the evidence suggests that the capital required to run the models is where a moat will develop. Knowing the weights won't help much.
rupx 3mo ago
Kimi 2.7 and GLM 5.2 released today and are open source.
- c0rruptbytes 3mo ago
  Minimax M3 too, and huawei claims to be releasing non-nvidia dependent training software too. openPangu 2.0 could be a shake-up if it holds up as a good model China may not care about open source, but they know they will personally fund AI through government investments while US relies on private investments, best way to scare private investments is a free capable alternative for everyone Add on the fact that they actually invested in energy infrastructure and can offer AI very cheap to their citizens and you can get a population well versed in AI to reduce menial tasks and focus on more productive things (if we're to believe the claims of the technology)
chabes 3mo ago
Qwen does closed and open. This is not new.

by jychang 3mo ago

ls612 3mo ago

The main reason the Chinese labs are releasing models as open weights is because they don't have the compute necessary to provide all of the inference. For the US frontier models something like 80-90% of the lifetime compute required for the model is inference rather than training. China wants to shepherd as much of their limited compute as possible towards training to keep up in the race.

londons_explore 3mo ago
With nearly everyone using inference accelerators, the pool of hardware is no longer shared between training and use.
SubiculumCode 3mo ago
No, they are open sourcing them because they don't have another play, being second/3rd tier lans
Slartie 3mo ago
I think the main reason is to minimize the market for closed-source models from US companies. China knows that doing what Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/... are doing is impossible for them. No one outside of China in any sane condition will send their data to compute farms IN CHINA like people currently do with US-based frontier models. Even if they could muster the inference power. Hence they do the second-best thing possible to attack the dominance of the US-based corporations: reduce their moat by open-sourcing models that are not fully equal, but practically useful and good enough for easily 90% of typical tasks people use agents for in their daily lives. But way cheaper to run. As long as this arms race in AI continues, China as "number two" will have some incentive to continue open-sourcing models. But of course the US government might force a change if they continue to enforce limited public access to new frontier models - there is no market to minimize if a model is not allowed to be publicly available.
- Barbing 3mo ago
  Ya. You know enough about China to know: would they be willing to sell users outside of China models that aren't fully pro-China (and won't deflect on tough questions)? Or would that be dirty money that they wouldn't want anyone to make? Like if they could release Ch-ythos 6 tomorrow BUT it had Western ideals, would they take the fame, clout, attention, & profit, or stick to the party line? (hope the monolithic brush is appropriate, considering, I mean it's an impressive system/country even if I have my own strong preferences - also I've taken as true reporting about their models deflecting etc. on sensitive topics)
  - rvnx 3mo ago
    Sounds perfect, sell it to me. I use LLMs for health, design and programming. If you want to make a political or religious pamphlet it’s not a single LLM that you should base yourself on. No matter where it comes from.
- Al-Khwarizmi 3mo ago
  I'm European and I don't see sending my data to China as more risky than sending it to the US. Rather the opposite. I think your vision of how the rest of the US sees the world is tinted by a massive bias.
  - wongarsu 3mo ago
    As a private citizen, yes. But at work the calculus is entirely different. There is already lots of exposure to US companies (guess where our emails and tickets life), so the increase in espionage risk from adding another American company is small. Not zero, and trust towards AI companies is limited. But adding the first Chinese company to send data to would be a major risk. One nobody would sign off on, given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information
    - rvnx 3mo ago
      > given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information Quite funny because if you use that phrase verbatim except swapping China with the US it could actually fit. Good governments try to do things that are in the interest of their population, and yes it could mean opposite interests to your/someone else governments. No reason to blame US, Israel, China, Russia, etc. They just defend their piece of cake.

zardinality 3mo ago

[dead]

csomar 3mo ago

The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose) and glm (coding) and they are both open weight and share lots of their tooling. There are lots of AI companies and it doesn’t seem that they all have the same funding fountain or share monetization goals. I wouldn’t read much into what each one of them is doing.

tw1984 3mo ago
> The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose) DeepSeek is developed by the largest Chinese hedge fund, their models used to make them $ on the share market are very profitable, they've never ever released anything on those models. Somehow you are claiming that those same group of people are going to totally change their very consistent long term behaviour and start promoting openness when they are in the global leading position in AI?
- hurtigioll 3mo ago
  selling LLMs is much more profitable than trading, and with much less risk
  - fn-mote 3mo ago
    > much more profitable I think you made this up. Right now, I don’t believe any LLM company is profitable at all. Unless you meant “more profitable” to mean “not-as-badly-negative profit”.
Barbing 3mo ago
Had seen weeks back that the top two non-Western models on ArtificialAnalysis were both closed: https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence-category-tabs https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence-category-tabs How much stock should we put into that graph, though, I'm not sure.
sameersri2004 3mo ago
Even if the models by the Chinese labs are open source or open weights even after they get to mythos level intelligence lets say, still inference and the optimization of those models to be accessed at speeds of 1000 tokens/sec in not in the hands of general public as these models have parameters more than a trillion and they can't be run on some publicly available hardware, So even after being open source it does'nt fix the problem as the general public will still pay the company for inference.

roenxi 3mo ago

If we're measuring progress in hours and days then yes. But if we're measuring progress in months then OSS models are doing fine. You can get a state-of-the art performance in an open model if you pretend it is January 2026 instead of June. There is no evidence here that the cutting edge labs have any durable advantage. Extrapolating current trends it seems likely that even the Europeans will be capable of meeting any given performance measure with enough time. In fact the evidence suggests that the capital required to run the models is where a moat will develop. Knowing the weights won't help much.

rupx 3mo ago

Kimi 2.7 and GLM 5.2 released today and are open source.

c0rruptbytes 3mo ago
Minimax M3 too, and huawei claims to be releasing non-nvidia dependent training software too. openPangu 2.0 could be a shake-up if it holds up as a good model China may not care about open source, but they know they will personally fund AI through government investments while US relies on private investments, best way to scare private investments is a free capable alternative for everyone Add on the fact that they actually invested in energy infrastructure and can offer AI very cheap to their citizens and you can get a population well versed in AI to reduce menial tasks and focus on more productive things (if we're to believe the claims of the technology)

chabes 3mo ago

Qwen does closed and open. This is not new.