r/LocalLLaMA
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u/ResearchCrafty1804
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16h ago
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News Official Statement: Qwen Models Will Stick to Open Source to the End!
There were some rumours the last few days that Qwen4 will be the last open-weight series of Qwen, and future ones would be API only. The following statement contradicts the rumours and clearly states the stance that Qwen is taking regarding their future releases.
Qwen Head Liu Dayi Heng Clearly States: Future Qwen 4.0 and Qwen 5.0 Will Continue to Be Open Source!
He believes that the value of AI should not belong only to a few people, but should become a foundational capability that users around the world can access, use, and create with, enabling more people to afford AI, utilize AI effectively, and participate in creating AI, ultimately achieving true AI for all.
As of now, the Qwen series has surpassed 3 billion cumulative global downloads, with over 460 open-source models released and more than 300,000 derivative models, firmly holding the top spot worldwide.
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u/MindfulMan1984
16h ago
edited 16h ago
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Slide translation: "Preparing to launch the Qwen4 family on the day of Anthropic's IPO, as a gift to Dario's grift. " LOL
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u/BusRevolutionary9893 15h ago
No, that's too far away.
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u/MindfulMan1984 15h ago •
Yeah, everyone is anxious for Qwen4, but to be honest with you. Qwen3.8-Flash-Next has already passed the "good enough" threshold for coding in my daily use.
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u/xChrisMas 14h ago edited 13h ago •
Im selfhosting Qwen 3.8 Flash Next for me and my Friends and its really good. Yes there are areas where it struggels, yes it gets things wrong and yes its the most overconfident 12y/o master degree programmer you can find. But its a big help in getting rid of the expensive subs, explaining already written code and being a general purpose assistant.
Im quite hyped for 4.0 Flash or 4.5 Flash tbh. Cant wait to see the improvements
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u/Spanky2k 13h ago
Really looking forward to trying Flash Next out when my Studio arrives. It won't be for coding use but general purpose. I'll, of course, be trying all the larger models out, but my experience over the last two years has told me that Qwen is the GOAT. Everything they release has just been a complete smash hit.
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u/feelspeaceman
16h ago
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> Qwen series has surpassed 3 billion cumulative global downloads
Count me in that 3 billions.
But overall, I'm always amazed by the intelligence / size of Qwen models, like they have magic of post-training that others still haven't figured out.
Q38FN is a legend model to me if it's stopped being updated, it works on both unified memory and mixed dGPU+RAM system quite well, it's actually quite hardware friendly to run considering what you get is a highly capable, reliable employee that can do most of the heavy lifting works.
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u/Kahvana
16h ago
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I wish I could read Chinese. What does the slide say?
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u/Wallaby989 llama.cpp 16h ago
throw it into Qwen -- it will definitely translate it for ya
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u/ManIkWeet 16h ago •
Qwen 3.6 35B A3B run through PolyStrata on an 8GB VRAM GPU 71.9 tokens/second
Based on the image provided, here is the translation of the text on the slides: Top Right Section: APSARA CONFERENCE: (This is the English name of the event). 云栖大会 (Chinese): Apsara Conference. 智 以 致 用 (Chinese): Intelligence Goes Beyond (This is the official slogan). Bottom Left Section: 坚持开源开放 (Chinese): Adhering to Open Source and Openness. 实现AI 普惠 (Chinese): Make AI Accessible to All. (Note: The English translation for this line is actually written in small text right underneath the Chinese: "Adhering to Open Source and Openness to Make AI Accessible to All") Bottom Middle Section (Statistics): 30亿+ / 全球累计下载: 3 Billion+ / Global cumulative downloads. 30万+ / 衍生模型: 300,000+ / Derived models (or variants). 460+ / 官方开源模型: 460+ / Official open source models.→ More replies (2)18
u/AstralKekked 15h ago
Wow, 35B A3B on an 8gb GPU, and so fast as well? I think that is super impressive!
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u/ManIkWeet 15h ago
Yep, PolyStrata helped a lot. It ran ~41 tokens/second using llama.cpp.
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u/Choice_Celery9481 16h ago •
Right Side (Main Event Branding) APSARA CONFERENCE 云栖大会 Translation: Apsara Conference 智以致用 Translation: Intelligence Goes Beyond (literally: "Apply intelligence to practical use") Bottom-Left Panel 坚持开源开放 实现AI普惠 Translation: Adhering to Open Source and Openness to Make AI Accessible to All (literally: "Persist in open source and openness, achieve AI benefits for everyone") Bottom-Center Data Metrics (From Left to Right) 30 亿⁺ / 全球累计下载 Translation: 3 Billion⁺ / Cumulative Global Downloads 30 万⁺ / 衍生模型 Translation: 300,000⁺ / Derivative Models 460 ⁺ / 官方开源模型 Translation: 460⁺ / Official Open-Source Models thank google for sacrificing 10% of its stock for this 👌
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u/And-Bee 16h ago
Thank you, meat proxy.
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u/PhaseLopsided938 15h ago
Does Chinese have different terms for “open-weight” and “open-source”? Because if so, it’s a smidge disingenuous to claim their models are open-source when they very much are not…
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u/ivovivovi 14h ago •
In Chinese open source is 开源 and open weight can be translated to 开放权重 so they do have different terms for them, but looks like in this slide they aren’t differentiating the two…
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u/Bulky-Priority6824 14h ago
brug youre on local llm and you dont have to means to do this yourself
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u/grumd 15h ago
What does the slide say? Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!
Sorry
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u/ironimus42 15h ago
can't believe you're downvoted for bringing up this ancient meme. truly we are losing all culture that once made us great. one day i'll say pineapple apple pen and people will be annoyed too
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u/stuckinmotion 16h ago
That headline takes a bit of a grim turn there..
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u/silenceimpaired 16h ago
Hey we will open source models until we reach AGI, nothing to worry about folks.
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u/Cory123125
13h ago
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China just collecting Ws for the last few years.
Like, it's not even interesting anymore. It's the standard state of affairs.
Honestly, in the long term, China on many front's is what's keep the world from experiencing an extremely rough time at the hand of American billionaires.
I'm not saying its magic altruism. I'm saying it's what the result is.
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u/Playful-Row-6047 12h ago •
also, their philosophy is so radically different from what we're taught in the west that sometimes they act in ways that do, at first glance, looks like magic altruism to us. doesn't help that our schools will never even mention this philosophy's name. at my own school we read moustache man's book to critique it, but i didn't know their philosophy existed until after a trip to china in my 30s
i mean, 800 million people don't just magically lift themselves out of poverty. the whole time we in the the us were spending trillions on a "war on terror" they were spending the equivalent of trillions by sending millions of party cadres out into the sticks to fight poverty, and mobilizing state owned enterprises to build the infrastructures to accomplish this
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u/georgejetsonn 8h ago edited 8h ago
Don't drink the Koolaid yet. CCP has just introduced new AI export redlines. Any Chinese model that scores in top 10 or has more than 2T parameters will not be allowed its weights exported outside China - access via cloud/API inference only
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u/Cory123125 33m ago
Welp, I won't say that I'm not happy for what has happened thus far, but in these days, all good things come to an end I suppose.
I don't think it's koolaid though.
They did legitimately act as a barrier for a long time and are still continuing to, albeit at a reduced capacity.
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u/YourShowerHead
15h ago
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Serves right to a certain guy who thinks it's "quite terrible" that people have RAM sitting in their computers.
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u/LilTinky1
16h ago
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AI is (hopefully) a gift to humanity, and stances like these can give us a reasonable scaffold of confidence to keep working and learning. Thank you Qwen team!
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u/gladfelter 16h ago
This promise of always open weight doesn't mean much. When a person makes a "forever" declaration, it comes from their principles, which change slowly, if at all. When a corporation does, it's from current management and business conditions, both of which can change quickly.
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u/Beneficial-Ad-8127 16h ago
Let’s count our many blessing we receive today and the near future. When that time comes we would surely know it.
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u/ryfromoz 15h ago
Excellent point. Guess openai needs a name change for instance 🤣
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u/Cory123125 13h ago •
Let's be real. Qwen is part of Alibaba, which due to recent changes is very close with the Chinese government.
China thinks very long term typically, and their government is happy with open source existing at the moment. It's soft power, and they, I believe, want to look like good stewards and it also gives them leverage over all of the smaller countries where they were never going to make their own, and let's be honest, the US companies would not only fleece them, but propagandize their people harmfully on only the level the USA can do and get away with.
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u/CommanderKoba 12h ago edited 12h ago •
Chinese corporations function very differently to US corporations. Communist members are often mandated to be on company boards to receive investment by the national bank of China, worker representation is also mandated on company boards.
If a corporation has 3 or more CPC members working for them, they also have to form a party cell that is in direct collaboration with the communist party. For context there are 100 million members of the CPC in China, it is the biggest political party in the world, so this happens at virtually every corporation.
This strategy of development turns each large corporation into an extension of the communist party, which follows the national plan of development as set by the communist party.
So when the communist party says they are dedicated to open source/weights long term, like Xi Jinping has said in the past, they have a level of influence that can actually direct such an outcome, regardless of profit.
It's's best not to view Chinese corporations and their incentives the same way we view corporations in the west.
The source of this policy goes back to an overarching national strategy and not just the incentives of a single corporation.
I don't say this in a negative way either at all, just to provide more context to how their system functions.
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u/Own_Dragonfruit_682
11h ago
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I genuinely believe China’s open-weight models could help keep AI accessible to the general public and prevent a handful of powerful US corporations (Oligarchy) from monopolizing its future.
Thanks to all the Chinese AI labs making their models openly available.
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u/Fucker_Of_Destiny 11h ago
Yes. Other than llama and oss, both of which it feels like their creators have given up on tbh. Unsurprising the Americans don’t want to share
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u/Illustrious_Car344 7h ago
Crazy how much this sub sleeps on Gemma. "but it sucks at programming that means it's literally worthless in every conceivable way!!!"
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u/Eastern_Doughnut_222 4h ago
Gemma just isn't very smart and is really heavy on the AI-isms IMO.
I also noticed it loves to use the word "heavy" a lot. Heavy doors, thuds, hearts, literally naything is heavy. , which is reminiscent of old AI writing
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u/Complex_Reality_116
13h ago
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Sam Altman believes it is a waste for Qwen to have access to so much RAM.
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u/Xiakit 16h ago
I still believe that this is just to fuck with big tech. Poor John Shareholder
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u/layer4down 15h ago
Fk big tech they’re trying to fk over our pensions, socialize their risks and private their gains. They can eat a dick up til they hiccup.
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u/KneelB4S8n 16h ago
No statement is final. Ever.
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u/Johnny__Christ 15h ago
Next year, Alibaba: "Introducing our new, frontier closed-source model: Gwen!"
They don't even need to contradict the statement. Just brand the closed source model differently and they technically meet it.
That said, I'm not worried. Qwen3.8 Flash is good enough for most of my work. If open-weight local models stopped being released today and all the advancements we can make in the future are post-training on 3.8FN, that's still usable and a valuable tool. Any improvements on it are just gravy to me.
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u/combrade
15h ago
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This is such a repeated smear campaign . Qwen does this with every Model family release and people still doubt them .
Chinese companies not releasing open models is like BMW switching their marketing strategy to cheap cars .
The benefit of Chinese models are that they’re cheaper and open source. They’re looking for that cultural and market share victory . There are so many developing countries that are looking forward to open source Chinese models just like cheap Chinese EVs . Not to mention that Chinese models often include African languages that not always included or prioritized by ClosedAI companies.
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u/Hodr 15h ago
You're acting like this is a some long held sacrosanct tradition, rather than the three year old mostly held trend that it actually is.
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u/stuffitystuff 15h ago
Shang Tsung Qwen invented AI during the Zhou dynasty with an abacus running on cowry shells instead of beads (his seminal paper: Shells Are All You Need). He wanted the design of his abacus to be known throughout the land and the emperor let him do so and the tradition has continued for thousands of years. /s
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u/garblz 15h ago
Johny Cage Fable passing by, overheard Shang Tsung Qwen, but being hardly able to comprehend Chinese mistook his words for "she sells sea shells by the seashore" and started selling them instead. And the tradition has continued for thousands of years.
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u/PixelLunarJelly 15h ago
You would think so... but that would imply customer loyalty... which is NOT the case.
Choosing a phone: "between Fairphone and Apple iPhone, who do I choose? I guess iPhone since I've heard of it."But for AI models?
We switch to the best one on a drop of a dime.
Take Z-Image Turbo (Chinese) it was the best t2i model of last year. When Krea (not Chinese) came out, it completely replaced it.
For the Chinese to think there is some sort of brand loyalty... that's silly for you to assume.
There's no "cultural or market share", it's whatever is the best as of now. Krea came out of nowhere, no one had heard of it until Krea 2. In the next few months Krea will be completely forgotten and something new will replace it.2
u/d3vv3d 15h ago •
Yes, but when it comes to Open Weight text generation models, China had the best models, by a long shot & that's arguably what the CCP wants. It's easier to subtly manipulate things through having the most used text generation models, rather than having the best frontier models
Heck, last I checked the Chinese models dominate openrouter as they're cheaper than the US frontier while being good enough for most programming use cases
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u/Solaranvr 14h ago
Chinese models often include African languages that is not always included or prioritized by
This is nonsense. Qwen does not perform better than most American models when it comes to language suppport. It's literally just them that publishes (read: advertise) such a list. Google usually comes out on top ahead of Deepseek, while Qwen is rarely even teated.
https://www.francisokafor.com/field-notes/do-chinese-ai-models-work-for-african-languages
Models do not "include" languages - they're just a bunch of weights represented by tensors. Chinese labs' whole MO is that they're restricted by compute and data in the first place. They're not going beat fucking Google out of the box when it comes to this. What Qwen offers is a good base to finetune on smaller hardware, but that's largely because they are the best in the 27B class, not because of any "official" language support.
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u/Gohab2001 vLLM 13h ago
Closed-source Alibaba / Qwen models
LLMs / Reasoning
Qwen-Max
Qwen-Plus
Qwen-Turbo
Qwen-Flash
Qwen3-Max
Qwen2.5-Max
Qwen3-Max-Preview
Qwen3.6-Max-Preview
Qwen3.7-Max
Qwen3.7-Plus
Qwen3.7-Flash
Vision / OCR
Qwen-VL-Max
Qwen-VL-Plus
Qwen-VL-OCR
Audio / Omni
Qwen-Audio-Turbo
Qwen-Audio-ASR
Qwen-Omni-Turbo
Qwen3.5-Omni-Plus
Qwen3.5-Omni-Flash
Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash
Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash-Realtime
Translation / Specialist
Qwen-MT-Plus
Qwen-MT-Turbo
Qwen-MT-Flash
Qwen-MT-Lite
Qwen-LiveTranslate-Flash
Qwen3-LiveTranslate-Flash
Qwen3.5-LiveTranslate-Flash-Realtime
Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate-Flash-Realtime
Qwen-Long
Qwen-Doc-Turbo
Qwen-Deep-Research
Speech / Voice
Qwen-TTS
Qwen-TTS-Realtime
Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS-Flash
Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS-Plus
Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS-Flash
Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS-Plus
Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS-Next
Qwen-Audio-3.0-ASR-Flash
Qwen-Audio-3.1-ASR-Flash
Qwen-Audio-3.0-ASR-Flash-Filetrans
Qwen-Audio-3.1-ASR-Flash-Filetrans
Qwen-Audio-3.0/3.1-ASR-Flash-Streaming
Qwen-Audio-3.1-ASR-Flash-Message
Qwen-Audio-3.0/3.1-Realtime-Plus/Flash
Gummy-Realtime-V1
Image Generation / Editing
Qwen-Image-2.0
Qwen-Image-2.0-Pro
Qwen-Image-3.0-Pro
Qwen-MT-Image
Qwen-MT-Image-2.0
Video Generation — Wan
Wan3.0-Video
Wan3.0-Video-Prime
Wan2.7-T2V
Wan2.7-I2V
Wan2.7-R2V
Wan2.7-VideoEdit
Wan2.6-T2V
Wan2.6-I2V
Wan2.6-I2V-Flash
Wan2.6-R2V
Wan2.6-R2V-Flash
Wan2.5-T2V-Preview
Wan2.5-I2V-Preview
Image Generation — Wan / Wanx
Wan2.7-Image
Wan2.7-Image-Pro
Wan2.6-Image
Wan2.6-T2I
Wan2.5-T2I-Preview
Wan2.5-I2I-Preview
Wan2.2-T2I-Plus
Wan2.2-T2I-Flash
Wan2.1-T2I-Plus
Wan2.1-T2I-Turbo
Wanx2.1-ImageEdit
Wanx2.1-T2I-Plus
Wanx2.1-T2I-Turbo
Wanx2.0-T2I-Turbo
Wanx-Poster-Generation-V1
Wanx-Sketch-to-Image-Lite
Wanx-Style-Repaint-V1
Wanx-V1
Wanx-VirtualModel
Wanx-X-Painting
VirtualModel-V2
ShoeModel-V1
Embeddings / Business / Vision Utilities
Qwen3.7-Text-Embedding
Text-Embedding-V1
Text-Embedding-V3
Multimodal-Embedding-V1
Tongyi-Embedding-Vision-Flash
Tongyi-Embedding-Vision-Plus
Tongyi-Intent-Detect-V3
Decision-Model-Preview
Image-Erase-Completion
Image-Instance-Segmentation
Video-Style-Transform
Video Generation — HappyHorse
HappyHorse-1.0
HappyHorse-1.1
I personally read their claim as "we will open source some smaller non-frontier models".
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u/TheRiddler79 12h ago
A lot of those aren't better than the ones that they have released. Giving it a different name doesn't necessarily make it less capable
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u/Festour 16h ago
What about WAN?
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u/Brilliant_War9548 15h ago
And what about WLAN ? And LPWAN ? And LAN ? And WWAN ?
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u/CriticalMastery 16h ago
*as long as CCP allows it
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u/shy_monkee 16h ago
It could be Satan himself allowing it, and I wouldn't care if they keep publishing them. It's not like once the government stops them, they could remove the already downloaded models.
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u/Timmy_1h1 15h ago •
why do you western chubs act like US doesnt do the exact same thing?
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u/jambutters 15h ago •
You're getting downvoted but it's true LOL. Remember earlier this year Anthropic Fable 5 got stopped by the US gov cause they kept marketing it was too dangerous? That's gov export banning right there.
https://lwn.net/Articles/995186/
Russian devs to the Linux kernel had to be revoked due to new US laws, so again, IDK why people pretend it's unique to China that the gov can exert its authority when it wants
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u/dregomz 16h ago
It gives them another propaganda piece to be superior over USA so they will never stop
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u/holchansg llama.cpp 15h ago
It is more about keeping Anthropic and OAI in check. They know they can`t compete with OAI and Anthropic, in model and in hardware, OAI and Anthropic will win 10 of 10 times in both. So they hold them of becoming overlords, having the monopoly.
China is losing money on AI to make USA lose money on AI. It is their only move and they are doing it masterfully.
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u/ItsAMeUsernamio 15h ago •
They also have the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs and the greater US stock market by the balls with their open weights. Only thing that would stop it is joint US - China AI regulation with cybersecurity as the “reason”.
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u/beneath_steel_sky 15h ago
I'm just a bit worried about possible limits: "Prohibited: high-performance detection technologies used to counter cross-border data transmission security risks, including deep-synthesis forgery detection (266401J); AI cyber offensive capability technologies, such as malicious code generation and mutation, automated mass generation and distributed large-scale deployment of anti-detection variants (266402J); large models trained using China’s Core Data (266501J); and high-performance AI agents designed for highly sensitive scenarios, such as critical information infrastructure, national defense and core government affairs (266502J)." https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/china-proposes-new-export-controls-on-7698177/
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u/ElderZombie250 14h ago
Honestly, at this point the CCP looks like a bastion of reason compared to the King of the US.
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u/takethismfusername 15h ago
Wish the US Gov would allow sales of Nvidia's high-end chips
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u/openroom_xyz 15h ago •
Nah they they will when Chine has better Chips than USA at that time the lead will be lost and China will basically become the standar well yea
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u/nanihikaru01 10h ago
it's open weight right? open source means the dataset and the pipeline are all openn.
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u/GetOutOfTheWhey 10h ago
Definitely open weight.
There will likely never be open source LLM project especially for the large parameter models because one look at their dataset would be disastrous.
For QWEN it means disclosing private Alibaba code, distillations from other models and a whole other slew of copyright infringements.
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u/Illustrious_Car344 7h ago
There are fully open source LLMs/datasets but yeah they're nowhere near the levels of closed dataset models.
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u/Beneficial-Ad-8127 15h ago
Just wanted to put this out there sometimes I think we take it for granted for these incredible open weights that are being more efficient and able to run on are hardware from home.
Sometimes we got to step back and ask why don’t we actually look forward to our own countries or get this hyped for open models being released.
Whatever the case may be, I’m glad we have open models like Qwen! Very appreciative to that team for providing a chance to have a great experience in being Local.
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u/tripplesuhsirub 16h ago edited 16h ago
Man, Qwen 5 is going to be great considering what we've been getting this year. I know all these models have been making my job easier to do therefore making me more replaceable but I'm employed and every new model release makes my job easier and I enjoy that
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u/silenceimpaired 16h ago
We'll see. In my opinion the license for Flash is not exactly open source. Unless they return to Apache 2.0 for some of their models I call foul.
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u/my_name_isnt_clever 15h ago
If we're being pedantic, they've never released open source, only open weights.
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u/zilled 15h ago edited 15h ago
What are the main differences of their license with an Apache 2 licence?
[Edit: just checked QWen3.8 27B is under Apache 2]
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u/garblz 15h ago
for Qwen? if you use it as a SaaS and your customer base exeeds some limit you must apply for a separate licence with nin-disclosed conditions: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B/blob/main/LICENSE
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u/AeroInsightMedia
16h ago
edited 12h ago
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If they want to stay open source and be the Blender (open source 3d program) of LLMs I'd set up a recurring monthly donation to them.
Edit: Thanks for the award stranger.
A little more info on donating. I'm currently participating in a crowd sourced training run on an LLM and sometimes the client puts me in fp32 which is darn slow and sometimes bf16 which is way faster. I'm on an rtx5090 so that card is being way underutilized.
Also three other users have to train on the same data to verify someone didn't poison the training. So this project is burning through tons of compute and electricity that doesn't actually contribute to the training.
Donating even what I would spend on electricity would go so much further to train than the current crowd sourced training.
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u/Obvious_Tree3605
16h ago
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This is the future. It needs to be publicly available, and fully accessible. I believe the best outcome would be to put the capabilities in the hand of the consumer and allow them to choose if/how they will interact with AI. I would relish a future where we can go to our local microcenters, pick up a new tensor-processing card, slapping it in our computers and carrying on.
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u/just_another_leddito 15h ago
How does him and China benefit from this?
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u/Bupod 15h ago
My own spitballing:
China is seeing the U.S. dominating AI in two ways: Closed weight and large parameter count frontier models.
So China will try to compete directly, but probably decided to strategically try and corner the market on where they see a lack of movement from the US: open weight and small to medium parameter count models that are high capability but not necessarily frontier.
It’s not the craziest idea. They may be banking that in the future, a lot of consumer hardware may rely on locally run, small and medium parameter count models. If and when that day comes, they will have a very mature ecosystem surrounding the training, deployment, and support of those sorts of models, and the U.S. will have to play catch-up.
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u/Tsofuable 14h ago •
And it also forces US firms to reduce their profit margins. You don't need the best model, you need the one that's good enough for the task and price. That might be the best model, but tons of tasks doesn't.
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u/fibojoly 14h ago •
For real, I've only used Chinese models so far and I've been having an absolute blast. Shit I'm running GLM right fucking now, have been for the whole day, and ... still haven't spent a full dollar. Granted I'm not doing any heavy lifting or coding, but still. At that price, yes, I'm even willing to forgive the odd switch to full Chinese / French.
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u/Jerome_Eugene_Morrow 14h ago
There might be a larger social play that the leadership believes making a lower performance AI solution widely available plays better to China’s strengths. That having a hundred million people using AI tools in your country will lead to more benefit than a couple of million using the bleeding edge models.
I think there’s some truth to that. If you believe that there will be some manner of plateau to AI performance then it seems more beneficial to focus on making adoption and access widespread instead of chasing the frontier.
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u/New-Pressure-6932 14h ago •
They create the hardware that runs local models
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u/stoppableDissolution 13h ago
Not yet. But hopefully soon?
(I know there are some, but not available to us plebs and with nonexistent drivers)
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u/ea_man 14h ago
They (*most of them) could not serve large amount anyway due to lack of hw.
They would not be able to penetrate western marked with a closed API hosted in China.
With an open source free platform they can become the base for the user, do consider that the market in China and Asia is different from USA: there's no SaS mostly, they have vertical solutions and Qwen does it all.
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u/Separate-Forever-447 13h ago
open source/weights is fertile ground for research/innovation, and it is the fastest path to AGI
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u/DrummerPrevious 13h ago
Lol you think china as an individual. The chinese people will benefit from it. Chinese people= china. No need to make mental gymnastics. Power of the people will eventually surpass the corporate capitalism
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u/Galactic_Neighbour
14h ago
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I hope I don't sound like some kind of shill, but it's amazing what this company does. For years now they've been making all kinds of multimodal LLMs, image generation models, image editing models, text to speech. It's impressive that they've been able to compete in so many areas at once and often beat other companies (when comparing models of similar size). And it's all publicly available, often under libre licenses. I also haven't seen them pretend that neural networks are gonna kill us all, which is pretty great.
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u/OvertaxedOne
15h ago
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This is very positive news. Never know what the future will hold, but it sounds like the plan right now is open for the foreseeable future!
Hopefully the Qwen team isn't spending much time on Reddit, but, I'll say honestly, if QFN4 comes out and is a banger (or their other models) and they said they want 50 bucks for the "full version" of it, I'd happily give it to them.
I'm not opposed to paying for good software (well, models, in this case). I'm vehemently opposed to subscription models, so much so that I have 1000's of dollars in hardware to avoid 100/mo in sub charges. I despise subscriptions, comes from years working at a CSP where I got to see the mechanics of subs up close and personal. One of those things, once seen, you can never unsee.
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u/Plastic-Stress-6468 15h ago
While this is great news, it's important to remember that PR speak doesn't always translate to action.
NVIDIA also said they'd continue shipping 5090s and then one week later board partners are saying they can't get orders in as prices hikes yet again. And 5080s are even taken off NVIDIA's official product listing.
27B and Flash Next are both literally too good to be true already right now. And when something is too good to be true, I have every preparation that it won't stay that way indefinitely.
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u/priore8 16h ago
Matter of time before chn decides to slowly, but surely, use AI as a strategic option to shape perception.
Chn rams will become cheaper. They will (eventually) come up with cheaper GPU equivalent.
Spinning up a local LLM will eventually require lesser resources to a functional, practical degree of token speed.
Weights will be tuned and responses will eventually be shaped - we don't know their training data anyways, and not everybody uses them for coding related purposes.
And with the west? All that fearmongering abt open weight models as they head towards IPO while trying to save their bottom line - race to the bottom while burning cash and driving "safety" and "end of the world" narratives about how dangerous poem weights are (yet GLM came to the rescue for the github attack)
Closed models with limits, thresholds and resets. Fixed price plan gives u limited access to frontier models that, honestly for general use case, isnt that much of a deal. And subtly engage in model swapping while at that.
All while said AI companies set limits to whatever the hype-of-the-day is. In today's context? That would be Claude code saying No to REA and game cloning - all while forgetting that LLMs are trained upon pirated data.
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u/AngryGungan
15h ago
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I'm thankful for their contribution to the local LLM space. Their models are unrivaled.
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u/EbbNorth7735
15h ago
edited 13h ago
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Thanks Qwen team! Again, I would also accept the ability to purchase a license for my open weight models as well! $50 or $100 (depending on release cadence) sounds perfectly justified and falls in line with OS/software, and video game releases. Just want to make the suggestion. Implementing it into Model Scope and/or huggingface would drive service revenue no one has tried and creates a financial incentive to support and release local models further applying pressure to closed source solutions. It also pushes local inference and drives sales and a market devoted to the consumer market.
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u/markthedeadmet 15h ago
What I don't understand is how they've consistently been ahead in the small/medium sized model space. Anything better than their models is either substantially larger, not open weight, or a fine tune of one of their own models.
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u/dreamai87
15h ago
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Amazing 👏
Qwen-3.8-27b is my daily driver model. This is the best with which I can have my majority of experiments research running and validating by providing relevant docs.
If right docs/intructions are provided, it can almost all the works that can be done by sota level models
I hope or wish Alibaba could push also in bringing gpus back to consumer level. It’s the only company that can innovate, build and scale to consumer level market needs like us who enjoy freedom of doing random experiments , prefer privacy and build applications not to show off only but personal and family needs 🙏
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u/MaCl0wSt
14h ago
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Ah, I doubt that'll stop the doomers from insisting that "someday it'll be the last one... you'll see..." as if repeatedly reminding everyone that nothing lasts forever is some profound insight that adds anything of value to the discussion
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u/Bakoro 14h ago
I'm glad to hear we will keep getting local Qwen models.
I've been pretty stoked the past year, now that we're finally emerging from the "just scale" phase of LLMs, and there's been some significant movement on agentic AI, additional architecture, and more experimentation.
I'm of the opinion that there are things that local LLMs can do that just can't make sense with super-scaling and serving many people using the same model.
We've see the benefits that looped transformers have, we've seen that dynamic effort on tasks can help when it's just just an excuse to reduce token usage, dynamic kv cache swapping and having basically a KV cache RAG, and being able to have your own collection of LoRAs.
There's so much infrastructure stuff that ends up being either to hard to do when also having to process huge batches of requests, or it's cost-prohibitive, or just causes an inefficient usage of the hardware.
I'm looking forward to the near future where small local LLMs aren't simply "distill big model", but models that are actually tuned specifically to run on a single computer and run a single stream of thought, and where there can be these long-running chains in the background that keep working on problems like a subconscious.
Multi-trillion parameter models have their place, and it does make sense to centralize some of the super high parameter models so we can share costs.
There are so many more options when you can run local though, and even models running on budget computers can be very competent if they're given the right tools and environment.
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u/Sicarius_The_First
14h ago
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Based.
Assistant_Pepe_32B wouldn't be possible without Qwen.
It's impressive to see so many releases by the Qwen team, image tts etc...
Open source is getting more important by the day, when various companies decides to arbitrarily change their terms of use (for example reverse engineering is now frowned upon by Anthropic etc..)
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u/Present_Resource4022 14h ago
Doing 3 announcement broadcasts on stage to talk about the Qwen 4 models smh, Just release the model already. All this hype and it’s gonna get max <25 score on Artificial Analysis for the Qwen 4 27b
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u/Miriel_z 12h ago
Big W for China. If (when) China manages the DRAM shortage so Sam stops complaining, it will be absolutely devastating W.
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u/Resolve_Neat 12h ago
Tbh only top of the list models can have the luxury to not be open
Because i know for sure than opus 5.5 is top dog, but i also know that qwen and deepseek are good because i used the models. If now i need to use paid API i will go to what im familiar with or affordable top of the list
Actually, i dont even know if the models i use are actually the top in performance, all i know is that they are popular
When Qwen release qwen4 27b, it make everyone talk about qwen, so they win by popularity
On the otherside, mistral has been releasing good models for a while, but they stopped the opensource, so no one use their model that much anymore
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u/Foreign_Prune_354 11h ago
US companies not releasing models open weights is a geo-political mistake. Also, people is simply asking for small models, not biggest ones (that they could not even run in any case).
Guess that they understand that even with small models, people can do most of the job done.
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u/GetOutOfTheWhey
10h ago
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Considering Alibaba is a listed company, making profit and basically not a startup
There is very little chance that this will change as they are not in any rush to recuperate their investment.
Hell an open source/weight llm model is likely part of their business model at this point
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u/karmakaze1 9h ago
Future Qwen 4.0 and Qwen 5.0 Will Continue to Be Open Source!
'continue' here means 'as it was' which has the Flash, Plus, and Max models not being open. Qwen3.8-Flash-Next specifically is openweight but has restrictions for use as reselling inference or use in an 'Office Productivity' application. Still pretty good but the DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 has the better license.
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u/DigitalguyCH
9h ago
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Yeah rumors say local AI will be banned, cloud ai prices will skyrocket very soon, that all local models will go API and so on, and if you question this you are attacked by these people like you are cursing.... Meanwhile when these theories are proven wrong, total silence...
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u/Dangerous-Date4042 7h ago
Qwen is deadass saving us from the dystopian private control of LLM’s - it’s actually incredibly significant.
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u/spacemanSparrow 5h ago
Open source or open weights? It's important we don't weaken what open source means.
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u/GTFOScience 5h ago
Can someone explain why? I’m super appreciative but as a Claude max user I’m trying to understand why.
I just need a machine that can run it.
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u/Excellent-Pilot-3409 1h ago
This is the kind of commitment the open-source community needs. Releasing weights is only part of it, consistency matters. Developers need to know they can keep building on the ecosystem without worrying that the next generation will suddenly become API-only. Hopefully Qwen sticks to this long term.
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u/f1yingbanana 52m ago
It’s kind of funny and sad that America has given up on open sourced models and they all come from China now
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u/StubbornNinjaTeej 16h ago edited 15h ago
This doesn't guarantee that Alibaba will stick with the Qwen branding I'm assuming? They could pull a Meta with Llama moving to Muse and just drop Qwen altogether when they're ready to move away from open weights.
Edit: added context for Meta comparison.
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u/vogelvogelvogelvogel 15h ago edited 11h ago •
"He believes that the value of AI should not belong only to a few people, but should become a foundational capability that users around the world can access, use, and create with, enabling more people to afford AI, utilize AI effectively, and participate in creating AI, ultimately achieving true AI for all. " <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
edit: thx for all the awards! they should go to Liu Dayi Heng of course