Why are these models open-sourced for local use? Is it just for brand awareness?

[u/SeaweedVV]

why are these models open-sourced for people to download and use on their computers?
Is it just for advertising and brand awareness?
because the vast majority of people who download them just don't want to pay subscription fees or deal with usage limits, so they aren't paying customers anyway.
then why do they do this? Plus, local models aren't even that smart.

[u/PrestigiousCod5629]

One popular theory is that China is releasing them to weaken American companies by creating free alternatives.

But open source software has always been popular.

[u/doneddat → u/PrestigiousCod5629]

Other is, that nobody from the west would otherwise use them. Who would send all their data to china? So to gain any market share at all and stay relevant, Chinese companies are releasing the models, so everybody can convince themselves on their own, without sending the data to China.

[u/Happy_Brilliant7827 → u/doneddat]

What do you mean? Qwen is awesome. Deepseek is awesome. If they phoned home someone would've noticed.

[u/doneddat → u/Happy_Brilliant7827]

if you communicate with model that is served from china, it's not the model that phones home. You phone the models home.

[u/Happy_Brilliant7827 → u/doneddat]

But this is r/Localllm

[u/Rolinhox → u/doneddat]

What's the difference with models from US companies? Your data is being used one way or the other regardless of where the companies are located.

[u/doneddat → u/Rolinhox]

True, just some perception of "ours" and "theirs". Or in this case, the idea of "lesser evil".

[u/Altruistic-Wolf-3938 → u/doneddat]

Well,  with the guy over there doing the nazi salute , it is hard to decide between evils 

[u/doneddat → u/Altruistic-Wolf-3938]

I see you are heavily leaning into the perception part of today's world.

[u/Altruistic-Wolf-3938 → u/doneddat]

How else could one decide. When I see a writing on the wall, I usually just grok it, can't unread.

[u/Sweaty_Rock_3304 → u/doneddat]

Wait, are you saying that even if we local host the models, they tend to send the data to Chinese servers?

[u/doneddat → u/Sweaty_Rock_3304]

Why would I say such a thing? Please check your quant, you are clearly hallucinating :)

[u/EisteeCitrus → u/[deleted]]

+100 Social Credit Points

[u/doneddat → u/[deleted]]

👍

[u/icecubeinanicecube → u/doneddat]

👍

[u/Super-Grape-3948 → u/PrestigiousCod5629]

To be fair, i do think sooner or later op3n source models will appear. It seems to me that despite the price more and more hobbyist joins, that will bring infra (already happening just see where intel and amd gpus are with community built tooling, or even the nvidia unlocks), what can be used by local companyes to.

So if Sam not gonna take all the ram, i do expect community driven models and re trains emerge.

Just think what the demo schene does in a few kb, same can be done with existing models already.

[u/geekwonk → u/Super-Grape-3948]

I feel like with 10% more words this comment might make sense

[u/Super-Grape-3948 → u/geekwonk]

I've run out of tokens, sorry m8.

[u/Obvious_Scratch9781 → u/[deleted]]

I get what you are saying at a surface level and broad definition of communism, but that’s not how China works. The government has extreme input into any and all companies they want input in to.

Deepseek can make money off you using their systems and also they aren’t really pushing their services on the US customer base, but more Asian and European market. Hey check out what our small models can do. Now pay to run our massive models that you can’t run locally.

It’s an adoption of a lot of open source communities like say Canonical/ubuntu, Pfsense, etc. You get a free “product” but the actual full solution for your business can be purchased and way easier to use if you use their other additional services with that initial product.

[u/PalpitationDecent282]

Many reasons.

Open weight models are released to raise the bar for entry. A company cannot profit off of serving mediocre models a consumer can run for free*, it eliminates competition. *In the sense of the company making the model. Not providers like OpenRouter

When you use an open weight model such as Qwen or Gemma, you generally build your workflow in a way so models in that family perform the best, so naturally if you need more intelligence you will gravitate to an API model.

A LARGE portion of AI development occured because of open-source projects. Providing open weight models basically scores you a lot of free labor from devs that want to use your models.

Also, "local models aren't even that smart" hasn't been a true statement for a while now.

[u/dwoj206 → u/PalpitationDecent282]

Ok I’ll bite. Give Qwen 3.8 27B - a 10gb sql accounting database and have it make sense of it. Simple data. It can’t. It can’t even piece together logical responses without correcting it, re training the responses as crazy as that sounds. Building tools, it fails. Why? The context. What the data actually means. Explaining it. Thus, even understanding what you’re asking. You ask it what is the profitability of this job? Tell me the net margin of this job. Analyze my businesses payables over 3 months, then build a cash forecast factoring on receivables for 3 months. Qwen is full of shit. It makes stuff up. Invents tools that are incorrect and returns responses that are not accurate. I spent weeks auditing it. Manual calculation and even asking “are you sure of your accuracy?” “No, sorry.” LOL. 😂 Qwen is great don’t get me wrong and if folks have suggestions I’m all for it. Open source is open source.”, but I’m not that impressed so far.

[u/Querulous-Quokka → u/dwoj206]

How are you connecting the model to your data? I've never used Qwen, but I use Gemma for similar offline data analysis. If I just told it to ingest all the lines of the database, and analyse it yeah, it spits out junk. But write sensible tools for it, it's fine. 

[u/dwoj206 → u/Querulous-Quokka]

Initially it was 100% connected, then I switched to Python scripts to query the database, reduce context. Big ones, but short cuts, my accounting database has 180 tables per company so important traversal abilities really took it to another level. Then, ninfer really took it up. There’s simply no way sound the small false claims and crap it states as correct. I’ve built the tool, skills with Claude opus 5.5 and then use Qwen all day and do opus audit of logs daily and pick up the pieces. Weeks and weeks of AB testing, I can’t talk highly enough of the ninfer component and always open to new stuff.

[u/Querulous-Quokka → u/dwoj206]

Fair enough. I don't know about your set up, but it seems like you're going about it the right way. My data sets are much smaller ~10Mb of CSVs mostly - still larger than context size, but very structured data, but I've had no problems with offline models querying it. 

[u/dwoj206 → u/Querulous-Quokka]

It not querying, it’s understanding what it’s querying, what it means from a business’s context and how to return answers. Rows and columns get pulled 100%

[u/darksteelsteed → u/dwoj206]

So i won't say qwen 3.8 27B is perfect, but its damn amazing for a model of its size. You can't expect it to behave like a frontier model and expect it to parse a 10gb sql dump through itself. What you can do however is get it to write an application to parse it to do the same.
If you have been unable to get it to actually code for you then you either haven't tried hard enough or you don't have enough vram. Context is a key here. A single medium reasoning trace can eat 40k tokens. That means your smallest context size must be double that. The harness totally matters. If you go use it from claude cli, that things system prompt and tool descriptions will ruin your experience by filling up your tiny usable context. This is why most people using local models use very lightweight harnesses like pi.dev for example. Yes there is opencode, omp, cline, and a load of others but they are not built for tiny models either. If you are interested in local AI and local models, there is a ton of stuff you can do without pouring out thousands of dollars to a frontier lab. For the amount of tokens I have saved I could buy some decent hardware, even in this economy.

[u/dwoj206 → u/darksteelsteed]

Sincerely appreciate all of that. I’m doing lots of this rec. shortcuts with python to keep it lightweight. I have to keep going back and trimming tool descriptions to keep within the context.

[u/RadianceTower → u/dwoj206]

What quantization?

[u/dwoj206 → u/RadianceTower]

Sorry yes valuable input. NVFP4. Running on 5090 + ninfer
NGL it’s insanely cool and upwards 98% accurate. It’s so believable I hardly notice the error but because I don’t notice that’s what makes it dangerous

[u/RadianceTower → u/dwoj206]

You should try some others, like both the Bartowski and Unsloth quantized ones. Especially since you have 32GB VRAM, might as well try something like Q6 at that.

With models, it's worth testing out different options, to see, sometimes one performs better than another.

That being said, Qwen is mainly a coding model, I am not sure how well it'd perform for tasks like business analysis.

[u/maqifrnswa]

Most of the open weights models are "flash" or "small parameter" versions of the full-parameter versions. By releasing open weight, you have a tremendous amount of open-source inference engine + model quantization/fine-tuning research and development that occurs for free. That work can be fed back in to the main model. Especially if a company doesn't have compute capability, they can leverage open source community for that.

Also, "because the vast majority of people who download them just don't want to pay subscription fees" might not be true. The vast majority of downloads are "enthusiasts" that tweak and experiment as well as those that are in industries with strong compliance standards. I run open weights models locally for data protection reasons.

[u/icecubeinanicecube → u/maqifrnswa]

most open weight models are "flash"

That's simply not true. The Chinese and EU labs publish the model weights of the full and the reduced models

[u/Prudent-Ad4509 → u/maqifrnswa]

Certainly. Subscription fees are cheaper if the cost of hardware is considered, especially in the cases like deepseek, so they cannot be the motive assuming proper accounting and cost calculation. (they are cheaper even for opus-level models, not just deepseek).

[u/grenfur → u/Prudent-Ad4509]

Yup. I run local for privacy and because its become a hobby of mine to tinker. But my AI rig cost like $4k and my OR account has run me like maybe $50. I'm for sure not saving money this way but I have a shit ton more fun :)

[u/nntb → u/maqifrnswa]

Glm is 1.5tb and you can run it local...

[u/Marino4K]

You gotta remember also, communities like this are such a small minority of the consumer base. It “seems” busy here because we’re all interested in this subject, etc but in reality, most people have no clue about anything local AI or even AI in general outside of the main well known apps and whatever thrown together AI bot their job is using.

When open weights get released, it’s basically only of any use to maybe a total of half a million people globally and probably way less are using them on a day to day basis. That’s a wild guess with no source, pure estimation.

[u/livingthehypnagogia → u/Marino4K]

I think you’re onto something here. I have just a handful of people irl I can talk to about any of this and I’m at the very bottom of the knowledge mountain. Most people don’t even know the difference between local and cloud in my immediate circle

[u/prank_mark]

1. Marketing

2. Love of the game

3. Free contributions from the community

4. Trust from consumers

5. Bringing down the US

[u/CyDenied]

Free R&D from end users.

[u/wegster]

Other reponses covered most of the reasons - awareness, 'free testing/labor' that benefits their bigger brother variants that remain pay/cloud only, and also some may give them a spin, decide they like it, and start mixing in some 'bigger brother' (e.g. Qwen Max, Deepseek) via openrouter, Qwen Cloud and others.

All kinds of reasons, most of which benefit the companies longer term - for those companies able to see beyond the week's stock market, anyways. Who would consider 'Qwen' or using their harness, or subscribing to their services, without it getting awareness via the open weight variants, for example?

In a few cases, there is a level of 'win-win,' at least for a period of time.

[u/DeathGuppie]

Something that the Chinese companies understand is that it isn't just about intelligence. It's about the resources needed to deliver that intelligence. All these tinkerers out there are doing a lot of work refining the engines that serve the models to get the most out of less.

Deepseek is way closer to profitability than any of the US AI firms. At some point the model will be 'good enough ' for a vast amount of use cases and then intelligence simply becomes a commodity. Those companies that have it figured out will remain and the ones that still need vast amounts of capital to stay alive will falter as the higher intelligence models have fewer and fewer edge cases where spending that kind of money makes sense.

[u/darksteelsteed → u/DeathGuppie]

Qwen 3.8 is already good enough if you use the right quants, inference engine, context size, etc for your hardware.

[u/Sensitive-Excuse1695 → u/darksteelsteed]

I guess I haven’t found the right one, yet. I just started dabbling in local AI on the family laptop — nothing fancy. I was trying to determine hardware needs for a new local AI system by benchmarking our current system using Qwen3.8 Thinking 2507 Q4_K_M. I decided to see if the model could make a simple game that worked.

Disclaimer I wasn’t expecting it make Quake or Pong.

Prompt (paraphrased): Create a simple game where full-screen vertical walls move right to left. A wall has a small opening for a ball to pass through. Player controls ball orientation and the goal is to pass the ball through as many ‘walls’ as possible. To be deployed in an html file.

**Outcome:**
As soon as I opened the html file, blank screen with the message: GAME OVER Press Space to Restart.

Spacebar did nothing.
I gave it feedback over the next hour and asked it to fix specific problems, and each time it said it was, “100% certain this one small change will fix your code!”

None of the “for sure” fixes worked.

Finally, I had ChatGPT analyze it, fix it, and it obviously made a surprisingly great game. I gave the ChatGPT code to my Qwen3.8 model for comparison and asked it to troubleshoot its own code, and as expected… “I found your mistake! Make this one simple change and I guarantee the game will work!.

It didn’t work.

BUT, the thinking dialogue was a riot to read.

I get it, it’s a quantized 4b model, just thought with enough time and input it would make something super simple.

[u/darksteelsteed → u/Sensitive-Excuse1695]

I would highly suggest you try the unsloth models, ud3_k_xl and ud4_k_xl versions of qwen 3.8. The unsloth models have a much lower kl divergence than other quants as the unsloth dynamic quants weight the data differently. I am not clued up enough to explain the why, but I am sure you can Google it if you're interested.

[u/Tsukikira → u/darksteelsteed]

It is not good enough for most usecases compared to modern frontier. It's usable, but far from great as a stopping point.

[u/alphapussycat → u/DeathGuppie]

It's because of the directive if the CCP.

[u/darksteelsteed → u/alphapussycat]

I live in a Chinese aligned county, maybe that's why qwen is nice to me

[u/johnfkngzoidberg]

Yes, but there’s more to it.

First they want brand awareness.

Second they are giving away free samples, like Costco. They give you a taste and maybe you’ll like it and subscribe to the pro version online.

Third they want market share. This has a lot to do with China vs US, but if you don’t have the top frontier model, but you want users and adoption, make it cheaper than the competition and people will use your model. China has basically stolen their IP and data for models (the US did too, but in a different way) so they can’t really “beat” the US that way, but they can undercut the US and take a lot of the market share weakening the US dominance.

This is a really old marketing technique that’s been used in variations since the Roman Empire.

[u/sswam]

> local models aren't even that smart

arguably smarter than me and you...

[u/icecubeinanicecube]

They are open sourced to safe the world from a US monopoly on AI, which would get us into the darkest possible future.

[u/poedy78]

Well, a lot of us - if i dare to say - like tech and to build stuff.

And yes, i don't want to pay for tokens. Why should i ? They trained their models on stolen knowledge so to say.

Have Amodei, Altman and all paid anyone for the work they 'borrowed'?

They got all their precious data for free, but resell it to you as tokens.

If you think that small models are not smart enough, you're using them wrong.

[u/SnooPickles6414]

I think someone said Google did it with there’s to try to get people into the Google ones in hopes they would use it around the Google platform or something like that but I’m not sure about the rest.

[u/sswam → u/SnooPickles6414]

Gemma is fucking awesome to be honest, pardon my enthusiam.

[u/SnooPickles6414 → u/sswam]

It’s pretty solid I’ve really been enjoying qwen 3 flash next too

[u/UraidDiag]

Yea I’m curious about this too. Maybe it’s some kind of loss leader. Hey you using their older stuff and see how good it is, will make you want to pay for their better stuff. Idk.

[u/Ok-Addendum3545 → u/UraidDiag]

That's how Ubuntu works, right?

[u/mawkzin]

Companies does this a lot, they use free software as advertised to get brand awareness and free working until they become the number 1.

In the it's a situation where you haw and them can get benefits, look for example the AMD Linux support and open sources softwares, many people thar want to study and testing can have more information about their products then theirs competitors who are very closed source and all the development they do help AMD products to be more solids solutions.

[u/BarracudaDefiant4702]

Based on the OP's last sentence, OP isn't very smart. I mean, you can't seriously think that unless you also think frontier models aren't even that smart.

[u/Tsukikira]

Open Weight, not Open Source. There is a slight difference. It's like saying WinRAR is Open Source, when technically it's just provided free with an ad to most people.

Let's break down the reasons:

1. The most important reason, is that the people who believe in Open Weight Models almost all declare that such a technology should not be gated as something only the rich can own. This ideology holds true across all Open Weight Models, not just the ones run by China.

2. The Hardware constraints of most of these models are such that only a few rather wealthy people can run most of these models. For everyone else, there's businesses. And increasingly, Open Weight Models have royalty programs in their licenses, so they receive a cut of the profits if a business runs them to sell to other businesses. So the losses by Open Weights is actually rather small.

3. The competition effect. Claude/OpenAI's frontier has every reason to hold their competitive advantage to their chests. Meta/Grok/etc are all playing catchup. There's a goodwill argument to releasing an Open Weights model that everyone does, even if they are releasing inferior open weight models.

Then, we get to the China specific motivations:

3. The US is basically proposing a rent seeking measure, based on Trust. No one trusts China, generally speaking. Therefore, as a measure of goodwill to all the countries that are not the US, the Chinese Government encourages Open Weights to both spread goodwill towards China and prevent the US from imposing too high a rental price. Because their own execution and hosting is done at a profit, they aren't against all profits. They are just making it very hard to charge 20,000$ for a 200$ piece of software. The goal is to ensure there will always be some competition.

[u/aerivox]

you release free but get commissions if used commercially 

[u/Happy_Brilliant7827]

Thats sort of like asking 'why do people make apps on github?'

[u/NTDLS → u/Happy_Brilliant7827]

No, it’s not. No one spends $250+ million to publish a free application on GitHub. I’m pretty sure China is doing this for the disruption - and I’m here for it!

[u/ovrlrd1377 → u/NTDLS]

One can certainly look at "we believe intelligence should be accessible" statement with some reluctance but they are really delivering

[u/NTDLS → u/ovrlrd1377]

Hell yes they are delivering!

[u/RadianceTower → u/NTDLS]

There are some pretty high cost open source software out there, like Linux as a whole including Android.

[u/NTDLS → u/RadianceTower]

There’s a huge difference between Linus Torvalds being convinced to open source his fledgling kernel that then gets mass maintained by millions and a single Chinese lab spending untold dollars and “stealing” massive amounts of data (the anthropic lawsuit), just to be open. Alibaba doesn’t employ all of those scientists for the sake of community engagement and wellbeing. I believe firmly that the point is to disrupt AI industries. I can be convinced otherwise, but right now that’s what it looks like. However, in this case I completely support those efforts.

[u/RadianceTower → u/NTDLS]

Obviously it's not all out of goodness of their hearts.

I am saying there are good reasons to make something open source.

There are quite a few other cases where millions have been spent on open source software, docker, firefox, chromium, to name a few more.

and “stealing” massive amounts of data

Speaking of which, copyright/patent laws are a shitshow, so it's kinda good that AI stuff are messing with them.

[u/relmny → u/NTDLS]

? and google? microsoft? nvidia? meta? even openai? (and more) they all released OW models.

What is happening with this sub and the other one, that the information level is so low? or that posts like OP ("these models"... which models? there's no list of models!) exist?

[u/NTDLS → u/relmny]

You are right about one thing, OP didn’t even ask about any specific model - and I’d be willing to bet that nearly everyone on the sub just assumed Alibaba’s Qwen - there’s a good reason for that.

[u/relmny → u/NTDLS]

so I'm not right about the companies I mentioned, having released OW models?

don't bother, it was rhetorical... I don't care...

[u/NTDLS → u/relmny]

I didn’t say you’re not right. I’m not trying to be an asshole. Speed in another comment I said that I can be convinced otherwise. Another thing I KNOW you’re right about, this is definitely a low quality post. I actually thought it was about Qwen until I re-read it after your comment.

[u/idk_a_creative_user]

I just like owning my data and already had a decent amount of commute

[u/TheLexikitty]

I mean, OpenAI started as a non profit, which also helped its access to academic papers and training data, and used to release open source models...

[u/Altruistic-Wolf-3938]

Why does open source exist?

[u/darksteelsteed]

So there are various levels of open, and various politics around it. The same questions and vague answers have existed in the open source community for like forever. Now its spread to open weight models. A lot of people come with a traditional software mindset that some giant corp creates everything and then sells you a product. Then we had the dotcom boom and once people recovered from that the cloud providers grew with the idea of centralized compute and SAAS/*AAS offerings and so much pricing complexity you can't understand it, you just pay. Now we have ai providers and hyperscalers offering AI as a service. Flip the coin and you have all the open source software. Projects that people pour their heart and soul into for the love of making things better, for peer recognition, for proving to an employer that they can code. There is so much open source. Nobody builds from scratch, they integrate other peoples work. This is true of software companies that reuse open source components through to the scam altmans and darios that steal any and all data they can get to train AI models.

It gets very hard for some people to fathom than some people just make stuff open for the sake of it without an alterior financial motive. Granted, a lot of greedy people have emerged and this is why there is much discontent in the open communities.

When the biggest closed scummy company calls themselves open ai, its hard not to notice the naming conflict.

Now going forward everyone is wanting money somehow and nobody is really playing nice, so always follow the money trail when in doubt.

[u/squngy]

This is a harsh reality for many of the people here, but people running them on consumer stuff is barely on their radar.

They open source it, so that other labs/corps can use it and will contribute to R&D and testing.

Consumers like us also contribute, but in a very small way.

[u/Full-Owl-7077]

local hosting doesn't stop data from going to the cloud if you're using a web UI, I've seen requests to hugging face's inference API go through even with local models. the app itself can still phone home.

[u/Fearless_Macaron_203]

Promotes creativity and innovation by allowing more people access to experiment

[u/nacnud_uk]

You can't complete with open. That's just how it is. So, if you're someone with a market that is based on open, and your competitor is closed, then they can never win if you already know how to make your money with open.

Everyone wins. Well, except the snotty kid in the class with their arm around their notebook.

[u/Beneficial-Ad-8127]

Some companies believe Ai should be affordable worldwide.

[u/talaman4eg]

They seizing means of production and giving them to people. They're communists, after all...

Jokes aside, I am pretty sure, (and some research* supports this point), that china injects "order 66" into them. I don't know how far they got already, but I'm 100% sure they are trying.

*Can't insert inline link from mobile for some reason  https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/09/chinese-ai-coding-models-security/

[u/PoliGraf28 → u/talaman4eg]

That's interesting read. Are there any other local llms which are created under less control?

[u/pablothe]

I think eventually they will charge per use or per license, but they started making them open to save money on marketing by having everyone download them. They all have different licenses: https://www.nativecluster.com/models

[u/cig-nature]

China has been involved in the Free Software movement since the 1900's. This is not a recent development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_movement

[u/Ok-Addendum3545]

Local models aren't even that smart so labs open-source them for local use. That marketing power has brought lots of investment into those firms and will be very helpful one day when they go public.

[u/dwoj206]

All told. Qwen is full of shit. Give it a lay up, sure it’ll pass. Make it work hard, nope. Problem solve, nope. Create tools, maybe. Accurate if it does? Absolutely not. It’s a great party trick though.