I thought Qwen was releasing open-weight because China can't compete with America (because of people's privacy concerns), so the only thing they could do is salt the ground economically with open models, and make sure everybody loses.
replyApparently that wasn't actually the play here.
Qwen is actually a pretty strong player in the Chinese market. There is an implied "salt the ground" play but it's mostly from hardware makers, who are trying to keep the big AI players honest and also stand to gain if local inference becomes popular.
replyI don't think there's so much naivety. People can be aware of the the plan and still be frustrated and disappointed when it happens.
replyI’m waiting for the grand reversal where Anthropic abuses the Qwen API to train the next Haiku.
replyFor a brief moment there were a lot of comments about how Chinese tech companies are our saviors in the age of AI because they were releasing their models. It was an edgy contrarian take that was getting a lot of traction, mostly from commenters who were unfamiliar with Alibaba and thought it was the anti-Big-tech
replyI'm not frustrated or disappointed, we have lots of models from Qwen already. We haven't really lost anything. And plenty of players only release "smaller" models anyway, so it's hardly unprecedented.
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