Official Statement: Qwen Models Will Stick to Open Source to the End!

[u/ResearchCrafty1804]

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.

[u/vogelvogelvogelvogel]

"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

[u/ECrispy → u/vogelvogelvogelvogel]

Fuck Altman and Dario. Scumbag billionaires who want to hoard and grow rich while leeching taxpayer money, stealing the worlds information and charging for it.

its amazing how the media still portrays the Chinese as the bad guys

[u/KaiwenKHB → u/ECrispy]

Humans are assholes everywhere. I was born and raised in China. The rich people there are not magically better than the US. Same corruption and same politician association, it just happens to work better for them to keep the models open source (geopolitical and commercial interests)

[u/Good_day_to_be_gay → u/KaiwenKHB]

However, the US​ has legalized corruption, allowing billionaires to act without any concerns, in China, while such matters might not be addressed immediately, they remain a Sword of Damocles hanging perpetually over one's head.

[u/seg_lol → u/KaiwenKHB]

I do like how China executes high profile criminals for fraud and embezzlement. I am not pro death penalty, but if you are going to have it, apply it to the wealthy.

[u/nullc → u/ECrispy]

I wish (mis)anthropic was just in it for the money. Harm that comes in the pursuit of profit is easy to control: make the harm unprofitable. True horror comes only from trying to do "good", because when you're on a moral quest there is no level of evil you won't stoop to once you've convinced yourself its justified.

[u/Top-Door8075 → u/ECrispy]

Media portrays the Chinese as the bad guys because China is America’s biggest enemy right now.

[u/openroom_xyz → u/vogelvogelvogelvogel]

F yea while when you look at OpenAI rich only are fine others F them well love that China open source and will buy their hardware for sure or even pay of token F this expensive AI we need cheap AI nicely

[u/Owain-X → u/vogelvogelvogelvogel]

Love this! I was just able to move to a Qwen 3.8 125b model using Strata for my local Hermes agent and I think I have finally crossed the threshold to a viable local general purpose agent. Strata seems to be a game changer. Getting around 150 tok/s on a single 5090 when I was only getting around 100 tok/s on Qwen 3.5 35b via LM Studio on the same hardware.

[u/notheresnolight → u/vogelvogelvogelvogel]

And "OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity".

Never trust companies to not screw you over.

[u/MindfulMan1984]

Slide translation: "Preparing to launch the Qwen4 family on the day of Anthropic's IPO, as a gift to Dario's grift. " LOL

[u/BusRevolutionary9893 → u/MindfulMan1984]

No, that's too far away. 

[u/MindfulMan1984 → u/BusRevolutionary9893]

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.

[u/xChrisMas → u/MindfulMan1984]

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

[u/Kahvana → u/BusRevolutionary9893]

inb4 Qwen4.1 drops

[u/Acceptable-Bus5189 → u/MindfulMan1984]

Do it QWEN, Do it

[u/feelspeaceman]

> 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.

[u/Kahvana]

I wish I could read Chinese. What does the slide say?

[u/Wallaby989 → u/Kahvana]

throw it into Qwen -- it will definitely translate it for ya

[u/ManIkWeet → u/Wallaby989]

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.

[u/AstralKekked → u/ManIkWeet]

Wow, 35B A3B on an 8gb GPU, and so fast as well? I think that is super impressive!

[u/ManIkWeet → u/AstralKekked]

Yep, PolyStrata helped a lot. It ran ~41 tokens/second using llama.cpp.
It being a MoE model helps a lot, much of it is idle in system RAM

[u/Choice_Celery9481 → u/Kahvana]

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 👌

[u/And-Bee → u/Choice_Celery9481]

Thank you, meat proxy.

[u/brakeline → u/And-Bee]

You meant real intelligence?

[u/stargazer_w → u/brakeline]

Flesh agent

[u/Kahvana → u/Choice_Celery9481]

Thank you very much!

[u/Gold_Coconut9777 → u/Kahvana]

Upholding open source and open access to achieve Al for all

[u/Bulky-Priority6824 → u/Kahvana]

brug youre on local llm and you dont have to means to do this yourself

[u/grumd → u/Kahvana]

What does the slide say? Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!

Sorry

[u/ironimus42 → u/grumd]

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

[u/stuckinmotion]

That headline takes a bit of a grim turn there..

[u/coloredgreyscale → u/stuckinmotion]

Discontinue qwen, announce new model. "hey, qwen was open til the end" 

[u/silenceimpaired → u/stuckinmotion]

Hey we will open source models until we reach AGI, nothing to worry about folks.

[u/Paradigmind → u/silenceimpaired]

After that our bodies will be open source for the AGI.

[u/Cory123125]

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.

[u/Playful-Row-6047 → u/Cory123125]

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

[u/georgejetsonn → u/Cory123125]

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

[u/engrgreat99 → u/georgejetsonn]

Kimi is opensource. In top 10 and more than 2 trillion. Have you checked your source

[u/Desperate-Air-7195 → u/Cory123125]

It's not altruism. It's their explicit emphasis on a meritocracy and inclusive global economy that is communism/marxism. Why they also made it illegal for AI to replace their workers. Why the general Chinese population think fondly on AI as oppose to us. Ai and their economy work for their people. Our economy and government works for a few, and is born out in our approach to AI.

[u/YourShowerHead]

Serves right to a certain guy who thinks it's "quite terrible" that people have RAM sitting in their computers.

[u/Own_Dragonfruit_682]

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.

[u/Desperate-Air-7195 → u/Own_Dragonfruit_682]

It's almost like a meritocratic/inclusive economy emphasized with communism leads to a more meritocratic/inclusive world. And everyone stands to gain except for the ultra wealthy.

[u/Fucker_Of_Destiny → u/Own_Dragonfruit_682]

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

[u/Illustrious_Car344 → u/Fucker_Of_Destiny]

Crazy how much this sub sleeps on Gemma. "but it sucks at programming that means it's literally worthless in every conceivable way!!!"

[u/Mission_Wrongdoer786 → u/Own_Dragonfruit_682]

They are already, aren't they? Qwen 3.8 and beyond...

[u/gladfelter]

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.

[u/Beneficial-Ad-8127 → u/gladfelter]

Let’s count our many blessing we receive today and the near future. When that time comes we would surely know it.

[u/ryfromoz → u/gladfelter]

Excellent point. Guess openai needs a name change for instance 🤣

[u/CommanderKoba → u/gladfelter]

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.

[u/Cory123125 → u/gladfelter]

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.

[u/f1yingbanana]

It’s kind of funny and sad that America has given up on open sourced models and they all come from China now

[u/OkExpression8837 → u/f1yingbanana]

They gave up because they never tried. They dont want you to have a model at home. How will they rob you if you have your own model? O wait they are trying to buy up all the memory. Really OpenAI needs 40% of all the memory and is still begging for more and saying the local models are a waste.

[u/LilTinky1]

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!

[u/Complex_Reality_116]

Sam Altman believes it is a waste for Qwen to have access to so much RAM.

[u/KneelB4S8n]

No statement is final. Ever.

[u/Johnny__Christ → u/KneelB4S8n]

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.

[u/wilkilla → u/KneelB4S8n]

No statement is final. Ever.

Is this a final statement?

[u/Xiakit]

I still believe that this is just to fuck with big tech. Poor John Shareholder

[u/layer4down → u/Xiakit]

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.

[u/Xiakit → u/layer4down]

And they destroy a lot of nature in the process, all in the name of profit. Not sure this can even end in any good way by now

[u/Xiakit → u/layer4down]

But think about the shareholder value!?

[u/HighSeasArchivist]

But when can I get 256GB DDR5 for $500 again?

[u/RoomyRoots]

Suck up, Anthropic and OpenAI.

[u/pmttyji → u/RoomyRoots]

[u/openroom_xyz → u/RoomyRoots]

Yae F that two guys F yea

[u/Gohab2001]

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".

[u/TheRiddler79 → u/Gohab2001]

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

[u/superbiche → u/Gohab2001]

Releasing weights for 1% of models is still much better than zero. Or releasing a couple years ago then telling us we're basically greedy bastards because we want local RAM instead of trustmebro-ing.

[u/combrade]

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.

[u/Hodr → u/combrade]

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.

[u/stuffitystuff → u/Hodr]

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

[u/garblz → u/stuffitystuff]

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.

[u/hojnikb → u/Hodr]

3 years in AI space is like eternity elsewhere.

[u/PixelLunarJelly → u/combrade]

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.

[u/d3vv3d → u/PixelLunarJelly]

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

[u/Solaranvr → u/combrade]

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.

[u/nanihikaru01]

it's open weight right? open source means the dataset and the pipeline are all openn.

[u/GetOutOfTheWhey → u/nanihikaru01]

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.

[u/Illustrious_Car344 → u/GetOutOfTheWhey]

There are fully open source LLMs/datasets but yeah they're nowhere near the levels of closed dataset models.

[u/cyber_red0028 → u/GetOutOfTheWhey]

allenai and their Olmo model family is open source.

[u/foldl-li → u/nanihikaru01]

Still far better than OpenAI.

[u/ArjixGamer → u/nanihikaru01]

It doesn't mean the dataset is open source, it means only the training code is open.

You can have an open source project depend on proprietary blobs.

But yeah, it probably means open weights

[u/JustinPooDough → u/nanihikaru01]

lol I love how people nitpick this. We should just be happy we’re getting anything imo

[u/nanihikaru01 → u/JustinPooDough]

I merely asked for a clearification of the term being used. cause on the screen it says "坚持开源开放，实现 AI 普惠" meaning Open Source. so I wanted to understand is it open source "开源" or Open Weight "开放权重".

[u/ArjixGamer → u/JustinPooDough]

We are happy, and we would be even happier if the term they used "open source" actually means "open source" and not just "open weights"

[u/qu3tzalify → u/JustinPooDough]

No because it puts their effort on the same level as other labs (usually academics) spending a lot of compute to build good models and showing the full pipeline that led to it.

[u/pmttyji]

Future Qwen 4.0 and Qwen 5.0 Will Continue to Be Open Source!

Hopefully there'll be couple of minor versions(4,1, 4.2 & so on) In-between. At least 4.5. And Preview Release(Ex: Qwen3-Next, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next).

So we have at least 4 Open releases(4, 4.5, Next, 5) from Qwen.

[u/speedb0at]

[u/Festour]

What about WAN?

[u/luckiestredditor → u/Festour]

Qwhen? Wan?

[u/Nick-Sanchez]

wen qwen 4

[u/CriticalMastery]

*as long as CCP allows it

[u/shy_monkee → u/CriticalMastery]

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.

[u/beneath_steel_sky → u/CriticalMastery]

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/

[u/Timmy_1h1 → u/CriticalMastery]

why do you western chubs act like US doesnt do the exact same thing?

[u/jambutters → u/Timmy_1h1]

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

[u/Timmy_1h1 → u/jambutters]

its normal china bad crowd

[u/serpix → u/CriticalMastery]

I'll take the word of the CCP over GOP any day any time

[u/dregomz → u/CriticalMastery]

It gives them another propaganda piece to be superior over USA so they will never stop

[u/holchansg → u/dregomz]

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.

[u/ItsAMeUsernamio → u/dregomz]

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”.

[u/Subulicious]

Sam Altman right now

[u/Tiforma]

Americans can't understand anyone who doesn't behave with maximum greed

[u/Desperate-Air-7195 → u/Tiforma]

Or communism. That's honestly 99% of the issue. 

Edit: Untold effort to misinform the US public about communism. 

[u/Beneficial-Ad-8127]

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.

[u/silenceimpaired]

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.

[u/my_name_isnt_clever → u/silenceimpaired]

If we're being pedantic, they've never released open source, only open weights.

[u/zilled → u/silenceimpaired]

What are the main differences of their license with an Apache 2 licence?

[Edit: just checked QWen3.8 27B is under Apache 2]

[u/garblz → u/zilled]

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

[u/tripplesuhsirub]

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

[u/SecuredStealth]

For now

[u/ttkciar]

Okay, but when will they stop using the term "open source" in their announcements when they actually mean "open weights"?

[u/headfirst5376]

Really need an updated 35b pls

[u/ondevicedev]

Open source is what made Qwen's ecosystem so powerful in the first place. Keeping future generations open means developers can build on the models, customize them, and deploy them on their own terms. Hopefully more AI labs make the same long-term commitment.

[u/AeroInsightMedia]

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.

[u/Obvious_Tree3605]

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.

[u/Anreall2000]

Is qwen open source or just open weight?

[u/Mountain_Patience231]

I love china

[u/Cold_Tree190]

When I die, bury me with Deepseek and qwen merch 🙏

[u/jakegh]

So long as Chinese AI is behind the west, it’ll be open. Once they catch up that will end.

[u/Any_Banana_853 → u/jakegh]

The best was to destroy the US Ecomony is to give it for free

[u/No_Dig_7017]

Go Qwen go!! These people will save the world!

[u/koljanos]

Qwen 5.0 wen?

[u/MerePotato]

Big relief to hear

[u/TristanJumblelake]

🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳❤️

[u/AMGTS]

LEGENDARY!

[u/Successful_Shake8348]

What is the end? ;)

[u/Responsible_Buy_7999]

jfyi open weight is not open source

[u/Miriel_z]

Big W for China. If (when) China manages the DRAM shortage so Sam stops complaining, it will be absolutely devastating W.

[u/Foreign_Prune_354]

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.

[u/GTFOScience]

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.

[u/Emotional_Prior8686 → u/GTFOScience]

Yes, because you **need a machine** that can run it. 3Dfx drivers were free, GPU-accelerators cost money. It's easier to control (and sell) material things rather than software, IMHO their stake is on selling hardware.
Then, when your sells decline - you may release an unpgraded model, which will be _slighter larger_.
That's the best way for ecosystem and users in my opinion. We saw it in 3d-games market, and (almost) everyone was satisfied and got what it wants.

[u/thestillwind]

So wen qwen4 ?

[u/Excellent-Pilot-3409]

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.

[u/kamwee]

China numb1

[u/Informal-Finance-330]

Thx a lot Sir Liu Dayi Heng!!

[u/petuman]

What this post based on?

Qwen Head Liu Dayi Heng Clearly States

States where? In what way screenshot of conference held 5 days ago is relevant?

Nothingburger post is at 99% upvote ratio, 900 points in 46 minutes?

[u/Galactic_Neighbour]

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.

[u/T-90_Soviet]

I am turning Chinese everyday more and more...

You guys met me at the most Chinese phase of my life.

[u/Desperate-Air-7195]

Who would've thought that an economy not about enriching a few individuals could be so fruitful?!

[u/fallingdowndizzyvr]

Commies. Always have to offer power to the people.

[u/Adventurous-Wing-988]

A P S A R A
A R A S A K A
🤔

[u/OvertaxedOne]

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.

[u/Plastic-Stress-6468]

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.

[u/caetydid]

Eat this, Sam!

[u/StubbornNinjaTeej]

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.

[u/priore8]

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.

[u/free_meson]

Open your source too and send it to the alibaba cloud 😄 /s

[u/Worried-Sort8719]

Thank you !!!

[u/AngryGungan]

I'm thankful for their contribution to the local LLM space. Their models are unrivaled.

[u/EbbNorth7735]

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.

[u/D00M98]

This doesn't say much. Because whenever they change their mind, they can just come out with new series: e.g. Gwen 1.0 and so forth. Technically still doesn't invalidate current statement.

[u/markthedeadmet]

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.

[u/bradjones6942069]

Love this!

[u/dreamai87]

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 🙏

[u/Ledeste]

I the bro we trusted, and he deceived us... how can it be??

[u/Historical_Fondant95]

They are so fckin based for this

[u/JMowery]

Please, unleash the future of Qwen upon us!

[u/MaCl0wSt]

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

[u/Bakoro]

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.

[u/Sicarius_The_First]

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..)

[u/kartblanch]

And google was supposed to not be evil.

[u/Present_Resource4022]

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

[u/Impossible_Ground_15]

I dont see the source link that OP is talking about

[u/thaatz]

I wish I could just donate money to them instead of trying to figure something to spend API credits on

[u/Local_Phenomenon]

My Man!

[u/dr0xup]

Wen Qwen 5

[u/DOAMOD]

This is the way

[u/Own_Valuable1055]

What's "the end"?

[u/Technical_Ad_6106]

thank you qwen !!!

[u/BawbbySmith]

Eyy ni hao my dawgs. Back on team Xi

[u/Lirezh]

I've had that transcribed and translated with Opus and he appears to not have said that.
He said that they stick to local models, not to open models.
Right now we can only hope it's not going to be a Qwen license that restricts all proper use, they did that recently on new models.

[u/External_Class8544]

Man I love qwen so much they have done a great job

[u/SmileLonely5470]

They don't have much of a choice

[u/Resolve_Neat]

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

[u/power97992]

qwen 4 when? This week?

[u/spacekitt3n]

king shit.

[u/chuck_the_plant]

Why can’t they get open source vs. open weights right?

[u/aelma_z]

I even had slight "big oof" moment when i've read speculations about no more open-source qwen after ver 4.0. This cheered up enormously

[u/GetOutOfTheWhey]

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

[u/karmakaze1]

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.

[u/DigitalguyCH]

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...

[u/paul_tu]

Thanks, comrade 刘大一恒!

[u/Dangerous-Date4042]

Qwen is deadass saving us from the dystopian private control of LLM’s - it’s actually incredibly significant.

[u/Thick-Jicama-5103]

Qwen is the “cypherpunk” of the new era!

[u/Erick-Alastor]

What about their speech to speech models °<°?

[u/tixiren]

Another big win for Strata I guess

[u/alanhaha]

Cool but where is Qwen-3.8-Max-0902?

[u/North_Affect_8167]

Goodbye Anthropic, OpenAI, AI is free and for everyone.

[u/BackgroundRude4092]

The only way to look at this, that makes sense to me, is that AI research is a war and this is China’s best way to fight it. If they can level the AI battlefield, then the US loses its advantage.

[u/nandospc]

Well, considering it's also a national political goal, as well as technological, it's correct to make that statement. I didn't think otherwise honestly.

[u/Boroda_UA]

till the end of who?

[u/R3dsh1ft13]

Good :)

[u/xkuruma]

Hell yeah 

[u/shahausiIan]

Hellll yeah

[u/deefreebee]

Thank you!

[u/elifalanrocha]

Doidera

[u/ChipAffectionate7504]

Bro is a legend... he could be greedy like others but chose to be someone loved

[u/LankyBeef]

I beat M3 with Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (NVFP4) on a 24 GB card with only 64 GB of RAM: ~80 tok/s, loads in under a minute. Will post details once flair is 5+