> Initial reactions are mostly anger from everyone who didn’t realize that the play along was to give away the smaller models as advertising, not because they were feeling generous.

The naivety around this has been staggering quite frankly. All of a sudden, people thinking that meta etc are releasing free models because they believe in open access and distribution of knowledge. No, they just suck comparatively. There is nothing to sell. Using it to recruit and generate attention is the best play for them.

▲

miki123211 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I thought Qwen was releasing open-weight because China can't compete with America (because of people's privacy concerns), so the only thing they could do is salt the ground economically with open models, and make sure everybody loses.

Apparently that wasn't actually the play here.

	▲	zozbot234 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Qwen is actually a pretty strong player in the Chinese market. There is an implied "salt the ground" play but it's mostly from hardware makers, who are trying to keep the big AI players honest and also stand to gain if local inference becomes popular.

▲

Gracana 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't think there's so much naivety. People can be aware of the the plan and still be frustrated and disappointed when it happens.

	▲	Aurornis 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		For a brief moment there were a lot of comments about how Chinese tech companies are our saviors in the age of AI because they were releasing their models. It was an edgy contrarian take that was getting a lot of traction, mostly from commenters who were unfamiliar with Alibaba and thought it was the anti-Big-tech
	▲	zozbot234 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'm not frustrated or disappointed, we have lots of models from Qwen already. We haven't really lost anything. And plenty of players only release "smaller" models anyway, so it's hardly unprecedented.