I'll diverge from some of these comments, I don't find it misleading to compare to Opus 4.5. I can remember how good Opus 4.5 was. If I'm considering using this, it's most informative to me to compare to the model it's closest to that I have familiarity with. I'm obviously not switching to this if I want the best model. I'm switching if I'm hopeful that the smaller versions are close to it, or if I want to have more…
Yes, honestly, Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 were mostly not really noticeable improvements over 4.5 and 5.3 respectively. If we were stuck at 4.5 levels but at 1/10th of the price, I'll take it.
I find 4.6 pretty noticeable upgrade, but it might be the 1M context. I'm interested in how the 1M context works out with Qwen.
This is their hosted-only model, not an open weight model like they’ve become known for. They got a lot of good publicity for their open weight model releases, which was the goal. The hard part is pivoting from an open weight provider to being considered as a competitor to Claude and ChatGPT. Initial reactions are mostly anger from everyone who didn’t realize that the play along was to give away the smaller models as…
4.5 is better than 4.6 though in practice. 4.6 was purely a cost savings change with enough benchmark gamification to look better.
Yes, honestly, Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 were mostly not really noticeable improvements over 4.5 and 5.3 respectively. If we were stuck at 4.5 levels but at 1/10th of the price, I'll take it.
I find 4.6 pretty noticeable upgrade, but it might be the 1M context. I'm interested in how the 1M context works out with Qwen.
> not an open weight model like they’ve become known for. Right, they state that they'll release "smaller" variants openly at some point, with few details as to what that means. Will there be a ~300B variant as with Qwen 3.5? The blog post doesn't say.
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 simult…
This is not even the first closed weights Qwen model.
This is their hosted-only model, not an open weight model like they’ve become known for. They got a lot of good publicity for their open weight model releases, which was the goal. The hard part is pivoting from an open weight provider to being considered as a competitor to Claude and ChatGPT. Initial reactions are mostly anger from everyone who didn’t realize that the play along was to give away the smaller models as…
Ah, so that explains the recent wave of Qwen team-member departures.
Interesting! What is your reasoning behind that? I just learned there where closed models from the team before this so that shouldn’t have been a surprise for the employees? Or do you think the internal communication was: we will release better open models the the existing closed ones to push everything forward and now when they are getting competitive they are becoming proprietary?
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 simult…
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 op…
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.
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 op…
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…
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.
> not an open weight model like they’ve become known for. Right, they state that they'll release "smaller" variants openly at some point, with few details as to what that means. Will there be a ~300B variant as with Qwen 3.5? The blog post doesn't say.
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 simult…
> 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.
No. Right now I'm upset that Google has removed (or at least is in the process of removing) the Gemini 2.0 flash model. We use it for some pretty basic functionality because it's cheap and fast and honestly good enough for what we use it for in that part of our app. We're being forced to "upgrade" to models that are at least 2.5 times as expensive, are slower and, while I'm sure they're better for complex tasks, don'…
In case you don't know, Gemini 2.5 flash is hosted on DeepInfra. They also have 1.5 flash but not 2.0 flash. I have no affiliation with DeepInfra. I use them, because they host open-source models that are good.
Thanks. Yeah, for now we're moving to 3.1 flash lite as that's the new cheapest at $.25/1M and is also still "good enough". 2.5 flash is more expensive at $.30/1M (looks like Deep Infra charges the same as GCP/VertexAI for it). I might check them out for Gemma though. We benchmarked Gemma2 when that came out and it wasn't remotely usable for us largely because the context window was way too small. It looks like 3 or 4 might be worth evaluating though.
From an espionage perspective your own government is the safest. But from a civil rights perspective your own government is your most immediate threat. China isn't going to arrest me for my opinions on Netanyahu, my own government could And the US government has repeatedly shown that it is very interested in collecting all the data available, just like China. In China this is simply done in the open while the US has…
> China isn't going to arrest me for my opinions on Netanyahu, my own government could I don't know whether you really believe this or it was an off the cuff remark. China is not going to tell you why they plan to arrest you. China is not a benevolent dictatorship.
The actual offense isn't important, nor is whether they arrest me or just kick in my door and look through my stuff. What matters is that if I'm not in China I don't have to particularly care what Chinese officials think about me. My local police can kick in my door, Chinese police can't. At least as long as I stay out of China