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.