Ask HN: What happened to open weights models? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What happened to open weights models?

Where have all the open weights models producers gone?

The last 'big thing', was Ornith-1.5. And its really a creatively post-trained Qwen3.5.

Why has the release of open weights models stalled? they were on a fairly predictable schedule, coming out just before or just after any given surge in frontier models; but now it seems that everyone is just scrambling for coin.

View on HN

I mean:

  - Aug 26: GLM-5.3 Flash, Qwen3.8 Flash Next
  - Aug 28: GLM-5.3, Tencent Hy4 Preview
  - Aug 31: DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp
  - Sep 3: Ling-3.0 Flash Fin
  - Sep 8: Ling-3.0 Flash VL
  - Sep 10: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
  - Sep 22: Xiaomi MiMo V2.6
  - Oct 3: Aleph Alpha Kolibri-1
  - Oct 13: Ling-3.1 Flash
  - Oct 15: Meta Muse Spark Open, NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL and Bolt, StepFun Step 5 Preview
  - Oct 16: Reflection Beam 1.0
  - Oct 17: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 pt 2

Your point is taken, and I suppose I should have been articulate; but these are all huge models, beyond the ability of most of us common folk to load up on a PC and run.

And to be honest, many of those models are not free to use from their providers.

That is, unless you have the hardware to be a provider yourself.

Do that again, and show me all the 37B and smaller LLMs that have made the scene, and I think you'll see what I mean.

Its a far shorter list.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com