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Comment by jhancock | Hacker News Reader

What leads you to say China AI is giving up on open weights?

I've been using GLM for over 6 months and pretty happy.

Why would any company release open weights once the investment money stops ?

Releasing open weights have been basically a PR move, the moment those companies need to actually make money they will cut it out as that reduces their client base.

They DO NOT want you to run AI. They want you to pay them to do it

open weights is a way to nerf your opponent and is meaningless to your business if you need to retrain a model because your trailing

So, it makes a lot of sense to get people a "demo" and claim the paid product is better.

i think a lot of people have no idea how capable local models are atm.

Two years ago a lot of people thought GPT-4o was usable for software development. I didn’t really find that to be the case in general but certainly it could do a lot of useful things. And now Qwen3.5-8B is just as capable and runs fine on an M2 MacBook Air.

QWEN3.5 coder next runs to ~84k context before it poops out on AMD395+ w/128GB. Most of what it's good at is boilerplate find/replace/copy/paste; but being able to scaffold things out and touch up 20-30% of the code is pretty sweet.

There is no Qwen3.5 Coder. Are you talking about Qwen3 Coder?

ok. maybe. I don't know. I'm asking how you know.

z.ai did go public on the HK exchange. They are under pressures similar to other public companies.

I know that China models are increasingly being trained and run using Huawei chips instead of Nvidia. I know China has a surplus of electricity from renewables (wind, solar, hydro).

Minimax just released a new model yesterday. You're conflating one company with a countries entire industry. There's more than just Qwen coming out of China.

People keep repeating this without any real thought behind it because of the high profile resignations on the Qwen team. Meanwhile the Minimax team just released a new open weights version of their 229B model yesterday. So much for that narrative.

The AI landscape in China is larger than just Qwen and Alibaba.

Of course, but for how long? Do you think that companies will keep giving away valuable assets for free forever, or do you think that in the near future there's going to be an open weights model that's so good that people keep using it indefinitely instead of going back to frontier model providers?

The first one is just incredibly naive, the second might be true for some people, for some tasks, but it's not going to capture the majority who're chasing the latest and greatest to "keep up".

the asset's value is in being released, so yes

What does that mean?

Every time you release the models you even the playing field out for the competition, which ruins a lot of the advantage your bigger competitors had. It also lets smaller players work on the latest tech and then you can make deals with them.

> Do you think that companies will keep giving away valuable assets for free forever

If China is forced to choose between giving the entire AI market to the US or releasing free models, they'll be releasing free models as long as it's necessary.

do you think that in the near future there's going to be an open weights model that's so good that people keep using it indefinitely instead of going back to frontier model providers?

We are almost at that point now, where the harnesses and tools are more important drivers of functionality and performance than the model weights themselves. We'll get there.

> Meanwhile the Minimax team just released a new open weights version of their 229B model yesterday.

its under new license prohibiting any commercial use.

The statement was that China was giving up on open weights, they didn't say anything about licensing. Licensing on these models has always been hit or miss depending on which lab and which release.

but context of the statement is discussion about corps do grab and rent strategy. My understanding is that referenced Chinese model can't be argument in this context, and there is no recent 200B+ params Chinese models with friendly license.

That license is more like business source license vs open source license.

Who in the world would care about that, and why?

You know what else was under a license prohibiting commercial use? The training data.

small shops are vulnerable against lawsuites, when will start spitting watermark text passages.

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