I'm not interested in adopting an inferior closed source weight from a geopolitical rival. The open source weights argument was the one thing China had going and that I was seriously cheering them on for. They could have been our saviors and disrupted the US tech giants - and if it was open, I'd have welcomed it.

Now they show their true colors. They want to train models on our engineering to replace us, while simultaneously giving nothing back? No thanks. I'd rather fund the shitty US hyperscalers. At least that leads to jobs here.

If there's a company willing develop and foster large scale weights in the open, I'll adopt their tooling 100%. It doesn't matter if they're a year behind. Just do it open and build an entire ecosystem on top of it.

The re-AOLization of the internet into thin clients is bullshit, and all it takes is one player to buck the rules to topple the whole house of cards.

> I'm not interested in adopting an inferior closed source weight from a geopolitical rival. The open source weights argument was the one thing China had going and that I was seriously cheering them on for. They could have been our saviors and disrupted the US tech giants - and if it was open, I'd have welcomed it.

Qwen is not the only Chinese lab, and the others have shown no change in their commitment to open source. Allegedly Qwen hasn't either if their recent statements are to be believed. They're just hoping to capture market share with *-claw customers before releasing an open weights version. We'll have to wait and see how before they decide to release that.

> the others have shown no change in their commitment to open source

I wouldn't call this totally accurate, especially as of late. What's closer to the truth however is that there's lots of second-rate players in China doing open models, that will be getting a lot more attention from local AI proponents if the big names seriously slow down their AI releases. The local AI scene as a whole is quite healthy.

> I wouldn't call this totally accurate, especially as of late.

What exactly has changed? Alibaba just released a bunch of new models and have said 3.6 weights are coming soon. The others labs have shown no signs of slowing down their releases either. Whatever you're referring to is news to me and likely most others.

> I'm not interested in adopting an inferior closed weights model from a geopolitical rival.

That's a very reasonable stance. It doesn't change the fact that we do have plenty of local models (up to and including Qwen 3.5) that are still quite useful.

This is not even the first closed weights Qwen model.

Whereas I as a Canadian am absolutely eager to see a serious competitor from a rival to the US because sending money south to Anthropic and OpenAI who think it's ok to spy on (or worse) their non-American customers, and are headquartered in a country that is trying to crush my country's economy, interfere in our domestic politics, and put us out of work and making threats on political allies.

I'd prefer them to be open weight, but I'd love to sub a decent competitive coding plan from a European or Chinese provider. Right now they're not quite there. If closing it and charging for it brings them closer to competitive, that's ok.

If the US tech and AI industry long term wants customers and a broad market outside of their own domestic base, they need to reconsider who they are bending the knee to, and how they are defining their policies in relation to the Trump administration.

Bring on the Chinese competition.

China (meaning the Chinese government specifically, not the people of course) is widely considered to be a low-key geopolitical rival to the developed West in general including Canada and Europe, not just the U.S. I don't exactly like this and would certainly prefer that this wasn't the case, but we can't exactly ignore the facts. This matters when we choose whom to rely on for things like certain hosted third-party services, including AI inference. GP's stance actually makes a lot of sense from this POV, even though it's just as true that many Chinese folks are doing wonderful work on open-weight local AI.

China has never threatened war against my country; America has. Between the two, it’s clearly safer to lean towards the Chinese options if EU ones aren’t available.

That’s incredibly naïve.

More naive than blithely blowing off threats of war?

Meh, people have their own interests and values. And you can't force people to spend money no matter how much you may disagree with them

Bring on the Chinese, fuck the Americans.

Americans hating on the Chinese for doing to them what they did to the rest of the world for 50 years.

Just without the bombs part.

How so?

Nothing but Love for China.

"the developed west" is not really a thing. its not a alliance like the eu just a description for some countries. a lot of them are split over china and its a major political issue in places like poland or germany. the only country where all parties treat china like the enemy is the united states, and thats just because theres only two major ones and both listen to corporations instead of their voters. the eu as a organization is a rival to china (not enemy) with all the special duties and import restrictions but thats just economic self interest and not every member is on board. when you ask the average person i think like 80 percent either dont care or think relations should be more friendly. if you ask people under 25 its basically everyone.

I hate to be the one to tell you this but things changed rather quickly when they elected a clown dictator, and now the US is widely considered to be a low-key geopolitical rival to the 'developed West in general' (blergh) including Canada and Europe ...

Seriously, even if you manage to elect someone capable ever again, the US can't be trusted to not elect someone worse than a toddler again in 4 years. In fact, you can't even be trusted to not elect someone even worse than your current dictator (if you thought it couldn't get worse, Trump isn't the bottom of the barrel by far).

You're giving up the rest of your country to a geopolitical rival from a separate region, in a separate hemisphere with smiling expansionist goals, even allowing armed Chinese security to protect Chinese installations in country. So why not give the rest of your country to China.

It will help them get a good flank on the USA such that even when that temporarily embarrassed country gets a leader you, and the rest of the world do like, it will be too late to do anything.

A perfect definition of cutting off your nose to spite your face laid bare for all to see.

The US under Trump is politically and strategically almost identical to China, and can be trusted about the same.

And then, compared to China, the US acts overtly hostile: threatening us with war, starting a war in order to collapse energy supplies outside of the US. Opportunistic beyond even China, much more hostile.

Will the US even be a democracy in two years? Is it now?

Nah man, balancing between China and the US is the only thing a smaller country can do in order not to be crushed

"Temporarily embarassed" doesn't even begin to describe what's happening down there.

We have an American neighbour actively funding and amplifying a formerly extremely fringe separatist movement in Alberta -- shades of the Donbas, North American edition --and a US "ambassador" who has the behaviour of a 4chan troll.

The bridge has been blown up. Americans might think they are a midterm election away from salvation, but we're on the whole not so naive.

No, a rational decision based on a crazy man in the US. The US needs to learn, that if it threatens its traditional allies, they go to work with china, the main competitor of the US. If the US wants it allies back, the tariffs have to go, and the childlike rhetoric and threats as well. If not, china _deserves_ the business of the US former allies.

Right, and we're not just watching the behaviour of the US administration, we're watching the behaviour of the electorate / populace. At the polling booths but also in online comment sections, as tourists, consumers, etc.

And mostly not liking what we see. Encouraged by the No Kings protests, but unless that boils over into a hegemonic and stronger opposition, it still seems like there's a 40% population there that can't deal rationally with the world inside their own border, let alone outside.

Also... When Biden took over after Trump's first term most of the protectionist policies stayed and foreign policy didn't really budge (outside of support for Ukraine). I expect similar if (big if) the Democrats regain executive power.

I've been using z.ai and codex latest models since last September. Each release has been an improvement.

codex handles longer sessions but the quality seems to decline and it tends to over engineer and lose focus. It will happily add slop on top of slop...which may pass immediate tests of "code works" but doesn't pass my criteria of "code as craft"

I'm using z.ai GLM with opencode. It's obvious when GLM loses its mind when the session gets too long.

I've been using AI to support programming for around 3 years now. The models have gotten amazing. However, unless there is a significant breakthrough I have determined that it's best for me to focus on short sessions.

I a) organize my work, b) improve my AGENTS.md, ensure source has appropriate comments to guide the models to the patterns and separation of concerns c) use shorter sessions d) review and test without AI. This approach means I still own my code. The AI is just an assistant.

With this approach GLM-5.1 is an excellent model. I never run out of token allotment on z.ai or codex plans. At this point, I only keep my OpenAI subscription as the ChatGPT desktop app is excellent at long web research tasks and I get codex with it.

> I'm not interested in adopting an inferior closed source weight from a geopolitical rival.

I'm USian myself, but I don't think the site should be very US-centric.

z.ai models are open weights. GLM-5.1 is very close to Opus with obvious exception of session length.

Only academic models will be true open source as companies can't legally afford to disclose learning inputs.

In regards to "They want to train models on our engineering to replace us". Some software engineers in China can run circles around some of the best teams in Silicon Valley. Days of U.S. hegemony are over. I recommend you make peace and make friends.

looking at the other replies I'm not seeing what I consider the most important rebuttal to this argument: there is no real "adopting" in this hybrid open/close space right now, the lock-in is minimal and as much as different corporations are trying to create a lock-in effect by closing down their tools and interfaces, they are not really succeeding

I can constantly jump from one provider to another, and to my local servers which are already able to run very useful models at reasonable hardware cost, and I intend to continue doing that for the foreseeable future

the one thing I'm not going to do is tying my tooling to one provider or another or getting overtly used to the specifics of a model outside of my control

more than the weights or the training, which of course are very important, the real battle right now is for establishing some dependency mechanism so that your users won't just flee en-masse as soon as you inevitably try to abuse your market dominance and lock-in mechanisms, as is customary in everything computing these days - note that i don't explicitly talk about raking up prices, that is just one of the most difficult methods as people are very sensitive to that, when you can sneakily sell user data, get government contracts from never-disclosed conditions, or even just incorporate your intelligence to ad networks in one way or another

I wish they had a revenue goal to release openly, that way spending money in them would contribute to better open models in the long run.

This is how I view that the public can fund and eventually get free stuff, just like properly organized private highways end up with the state/society owning a new highway after the private entity that built it got the profits they required to make the project possible.

There are a lot of options for doing things this way:

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

As a publicity stunt, releasing a 300B open model is pretty smart. You can talk about its strong performance and it being “open” and “available,” but it’s so large that most people can’t use it themselves and might try out the cloud-based offering.

The large models are actually MoE these days so they're usable on ordinary hardware with weights streaming from SSD, just very slow. You're nonethess right that it makes the cloud-based offering more popular, since you can use that for convenience after testing a few inferences locally.

“Usable but slow” is how you could run regardless of MoE or not, the model architecture has nothing to do with it. MoE might run N times faster than non MoE where N is the number of experts but that’s it.

There are plenty of model providers that can serve them though at cheaper prices and cannibalize Alibaba revenue.

You can run it on runpod for example.

I'm running qwen 3.5 397b on very standard hardware. Just use the unsloth quants, they're great. I get like 20t/s or something.

It's super not a publicity stunt, qwen 3.5 is the base of the best local models out there IMO.

Well, you didn’t post the specs on your rig. I think it’s probably more correct to say that you run it on very beefy but readily available hardware. My point was not that nobody could run a 300B model, but rather that a 300B model is not going to be runnable by a majority of people. Sure, anyone who wants to run that model and has the money to purchase the hardware can do it. But the hardware is going to be pricey and most people don’t already have it unless they were trying to run large models before this. My overarching point is that most people with average laptop specs purchased over the last 3 to 5 years are going to have to consume this from the cloud. Which is great for Qwen.

I can run a 300b model, but I don't do it. We need the H100's for training

I just have a 3090 and 64gb ram. Yes this is more than most people have, but calling it a "publicity stunt" is just so uncharitably weird of a characterization.

There's smaller models all the way down too.

Like this should be _exactly_ what we want companies to release.

I apologize. I didn’t mean to suggest a “publicity stunt” was a negative. Perhaps I should have said that it was a great marketing strategy. My point was, they can cite all the metrics associated with a frontier model and yet to actually get those metrics most users will have to purchase cloud-based services. That all. And sure, some people will definitely be able to run the model and benefit from it. As you say, this is what we want.

Yeah it is apparently some kind of marketing strategy I guess. Tbh I can't imagine they're getting enough out of it for it to make sense for them. Personally, I'm not looking the gift horse in the mouth too closely, I'm just happy that the current insane rush to make better models means we get some decent "open" ones to play with.