Quite literally the government in China came out and said "It'd be better for us if we did more open models and collaborated with other countries also doing open models" and then Qwen changed their tune. It's literally thanks to China in this case, not competitors/peers in China. Their government is horrible for a lot of stuff, but in this case they do deserve praise for forcing the "right" (according to me) direction.
> Their government is horrible for a lot of stuff, but in this case they do deserve praise for forcing the "right" (according to me) direction.
It's not just according to you.
Without open weights, what happens if you get blacklisted from Anthropic and OpenAI? If AI becomes a standard tool for programming like a compiler, you've effectively been Blackballed from the field of programming. Full Stop. This is "Right to Read" coming home: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
In addition, without open source competitors to your core tools, we KNOW what happens. Cadence and Synopsys and a megabuck per engineer per year ... that's what happens.
Realpolitik I guess. They want to destabilize the USA, and we want open weights we can run on our own machines. As long as those interests coincide, we are allied.
The best outcome for us is the one where they all keep competing and undermining each other until the end of time while providing us all with better models and cheaper hardware to run them with. The US corporations in particular should never be allowed to achieve their "you'll buy intelligence from us on a meter" rent seeking dream.
The US is destabilizing itself plenty on its own. I think this is just a question of common sense, and the party's long standing habit of pushing some competition but not too much competition, to avoid wasted effort.
when Mistral finally releases Le Chaton Fat, I will switch to that but until then, I will count my lucky starts that this exists. Cheers to Qwen3.8-2.4T release day
Our desire for better local models just happens to coincide with China's desire to destroy the western AI company business model by releasing local models. I doubt there's any philanthropy involved.
I find it really weird why people keep framing decisions like this in terms of morals and selflessness, e.g., "is/isn't philantropy". This is about relationships and mutual benefit.
They literally announced their motivations and world few a few weeks ago at the Shanghai AI conference. They want to ally with the global south. They see AI like the industrial revolution: the global south was left behind for a long time and, as a result has been exploited and has struggled to develop for a long time. They see open AI as a way to level the playing field to prevent such "new historical injustices" (in the sense of the Century of Humiliation and the Opium Wars). Concrete policies to back this rhetoric include technology transfer and training programs for the global south. They frame this latter not as philantropy but as generosity, in the sense that it generates goodwill and what goes around comes around. They believe that helping the global south and cultivating relationships will eventually help China.
Think about it. Your local businesses are not charities either. That doesn't make them bad, nor does it mean you derive no benefit. It still benefits you to cultivate good relationships with them.
China has been using that rhetoric of "helping" the global south ever since it emerged as a super power. In most cases, it has a lot less to do with generosity than with securing natural resources and international influence.
Generosity and securing natural resources and international influence don't have to be mutually exclusive. If you interview Africans, then they say that while cooperation with China has problems, they sure are glad they at least have more choices now, and on the whole China's existence is beneficial. The alternative — only western choices and no China — sure hasn't served them well in the past half century.
No matter what you believe is their "true" intentions, offering 5000 training and tech transfer positions to the global south is a very concrete and unambiguous move. As are forgiving African loans and unilaterally offering zero trade tariffs.
If what China has been doing is considered generous, then so should the tens of billions in foreign aid that the West has sent to the South over the years.
I'm not saying that China's investment in the South hasn't had positive effects. But "generosity" is rarely a relevant lens when analyzing international relations.
> then so should the tens of billions in foreign aid that the West has sent to the South over the years.
Well, yes? Why does it have to be either-or?
> But "generosity" is rarely a relevant lens when analyzing international relations.
Automatically assuming nefarious intentions behind all moves is also rarely a relevant lens.
And as I said, and I'm not sure why you keep ignoring it, but I define "generosity" in the sense of mutual benefit. Being nice to your neighbors and helping them, benefits you due to generated goodwill. I'm explicitly not defining generosity in the sense of selfless philanthropy where you get nothing back. The idea that doing good things for others eventually results in good things coming your way, and thus that one should do good things for others even it's selfishly motivated (and also that there's nothing wrong with this), is not a crazy idea.
In a lot of cultures (Chinese included), gifts are not simply gifts. There is the social expectation that the gift is reciprocated. Western cynicists may call this "manipulation" or "influence". The Chinese see this as the start of a relationship of a cycle of mutual gift giving.
Which coincidentally helps average people far more than the already rich investors in a few western mega corps.
If it weren’t for these big Chinese model releases the western companies wouldn’t release anything at all. The field would be advancing at a snail’s pace.
And what do you think happens after the govt said that? Going to companies and force them to open models? That's only how westerners' misconception of China works. If you study Chinese EV industrial policy history you'll know they're not based on coercion of private parties but on incentives (and that, ironically, private EV companies succeeded despite incentives, not because).
The real policy mechanisms around open AI models are also incentives. Various cities have programs to pay companies for releasing open models. They subsidize compute through vouchers. They reward universities and students for open source collaboration.
This isn't some black box. The policies are written down, anybody can read their AI+ policy papers.
Alibaba went back to releasing open models way before the Xi speech from a few weeks ago. The cause is pressure from researchers, who believe in openness, as well as the competition who keeps releasing open models. This is Chinese "involution" at work. And the subsidies also help, of course.
The obvious goal is to destabilize the western economy and prove that US tech is a worthless bubble - but I agree, OSS AI is great for everybody and what OpenAI was supposed to be
There’s an alternate universe in which OpenAI stays open, licenses according to revenue, Chinese models don’t gain traction in the US because domestic models take all the capacity…whatever, $1T IPO beats the right answer ever time
> Chinese models don’t gain traction in the US because domestic models take all the capacity…whatever, $1T IPO beats the right answer ever time
The trouble here is how more infrastructure helps OpenAI and Anthropic continue billing at 10/100x Chinese model rates.
Either their models have to be better (to justify the higher prices and margin) or their inference has to be lower cost (which isn't going to happen until they move away from Nvidia).
Black market operators can resell stolen account tokens at a lower price than authentic premier tokens from frontier labs and can host their own infra too. I'm not super convinced frontier model serving without downstream model development on a vertical specific software / knowledge worker "factory" model can work
