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 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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Zetaphor 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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jhancock 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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).

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cyanydeez 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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jeremyjh 8 hours ago | parent [-]

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 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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Zetaphor 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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andriy_koval 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Meanwhile the Minimax team just released a new open weights version of their 229B model yesterday.

its under new license prohibiting any commercial use.

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Zetaphor 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The statement was that China was giving up on open weights, they didn't say anything about licensing. Licensing on these models has always been hit or miss depending on which lab and which release.

	▲	andriy_koval 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		but context of the statement is discussion about corps do grab and rent strategy. My understanding is that referenced Chinese model can't be argument in this context, and there is no recent 200B+ params Chinese models with friendly license. That license is more like business source license vs open source license.

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dns_snek 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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".

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bachmeier 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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Throaway199999 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

the asset's value is in being released, so yes

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dns_snek 5 hours ago | parent [-]

What does that mean?

	▲	Throaway199999 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.