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Qwen 3.8

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Re: Qwen 3.8

#321

Post by CamperBob2 »

NiloCK wrote: post #319
CamperBob2 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need AI to build a nuke in your garage. You need uranium. And if you have uranium, you still don't need AI. You need a pocket calculator, a library card, and a death wish.

Yes - persons with death wishes having arbitrarily powerful consultation is the crux of it. Apologies for the bad example. Replace w/ gain of function / whatever else, or just brainstorm with your local model, ect.

If you are going to do something evil, you're going to do it either way. The best (worst) an AI can do is put you ahead by a couple of years. Aum Shin Rikyo didn't need AI. Neither did WIV, if you believe the conspiracy theories.

Meanwhile, decelerationism and secrecy cripple the rest of us.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#322

Post by zozbot234 »

NiloCK wrote: post #280
zozbot234 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s a Twitter thread making rounds by Dean Ball about deceleration in AI development caused by open models and I can’t understand how people don’t see that it’s true: open models dismantle the frontier lab capex spend potential by reducing the training budget to zero in the limit. If you're worried about an AGI arms race between the U.S. and China putting AI Safety at risk, then the fact that inherently less kn…

The logic, whose premises you can take or leave: Even at the level of, say, Opus 4.5+, open weight models give a quick turnaround to every Joe and Jane on earth having easy access to pretty high quality improvised weapons design, cyber / auto-fraud capabilities, etc. All the existing models (closed and open) put up decent resistance to participating in activities like this, and especially behind API walls with conten…

Abliteration is not magic. It cannot give the model knowledge that it wasn't specifically trained for. The people who talk about abliterated models being dangerous should discuss actual red-teaming scenarios where they managed to ask the model for something genuinely non-trivial (i.e. where "AGI" and "super-intelligence" actually matters, not something you can read about for free at the nearest public library) and it returned an answer that actually provides bad actors with new capabilities of concern, as opposed to hallucinating all sorts of weird things as abliterated models are wont to do.

(Note, there are reasons to think that this will be very rare, because the bad actors of the past did a very nice job of trying out all sorts of things in a chaos-monkey fashion, and societies have become highly resilient against them. AI as a new research tool doesn't fundamentally change this dynamic.)

Re: Qwen 3.8

#323

Post by kzrdude »

gardnr wrote: post #6
adrian_b wrote: post #4

I assume that this announcement has been prompted by that of Moonshot AI, which has just announced a 2.8T parameter open-weights LLM, Kimi K3, to be published on Huggingface by 27 July. Now the response of Alibaba is that they will also publish soon a big open weights LLM, the 2.4T parameter Qwen 3.8. I wonder if Alibaba has always planned to make this big LLM open weights, or they have chosen to do this now, to bett…

It's hard to say what their motivation is. The Chinese firms seem to be working hard to commoditize intelligence which may be the most effective way to debase American frontier labs. And yeah: it also happens to be really good for humanity.

Fwiw, American industry has given away a lot for free - you could include large parts of the open source movement in that - and all the "free" VC backed services like facebook would be another prong of the same comparison. I would rather compare this way, that China is gaining soft power and goodwill, in the technology and innovation sense, in a way that's similar to how USA has done in the past.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#324

Post by kelnos »

gardnr wrote: post #6
adrian_b wrote: post #4

I assume that this announcement has been prompted by that of Moonshot AI, which has just announced a 2.8T parameter open-weights LLM, Kimi K3, to be published on Huggingface by 27 July. Now the response of Alibaba is that they will also publish soon a big open weights LLM, the 2.4T parameter Qwen 3.8. I wonder if Alibaba has always planned to make this big LLM open weights, or they have chosen to do this now, to bett…

It's hard to say what their motivation is. The Chinese firms seem to be working hard to commoditize intelligence which may be the most effective way to debase American frontier labs. And yeah: it also happens to be really good for humanity.

> It's hard to say what their motivation is.

Feels pretty easy to me.

They want to turn LLMs into a commodity, and watch the US AI labs crash and burn.

There will still be plenty of customers who will pay them to host the models and run inference, even if the weights are open and others can offer competing products. (If necessary, the Chinese government can ban use of foreign inference services by Chinese citizens and businesses to give their own companies a domestic monopoly.)

When their models equal or surpass those from the Western AI labs, they can even stop releasing weights for new models, and keep all the inference revenue for themselves.

Meanwhile, they're still manufacturing much of the hardware that everyone in the world needs in order to run datacenters (see also: Spolsky's "commoditize your complement" essay).

Beyond that, it's a soft-power play. As the world keeps looking at the US more and more skeptically as an ally and superpower, Chinese companies releasing weights for competitive models is a way for China to look better and more world-minded.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#325

Post by vitalyan8184 »

hodgehog11 wrote: post #14

The "second only to Fable 5" comment is pretty telling here. I remember early on when a lot of naysayers were saying that Fable was barely an improvement on Opus. Like it or not, Anthropic have a genuine moat right now with that model, provided they continue to allow people to use it. It will be genuinely exciting when an open model is able to beat it.

[dead]

Re: Qwen 3.8

#326

Post by nsagent »

nsbk wrote: post #19

Bring it on! Hoping that they release smaller sizes of Qwen3.8. I use the 35B MoE and 27B dense models locally and most of the time I don’t need to reach out to Claude. Extremely useful specially when requests include sensitive and/or personal data

[flagged]

Re: Qwen 3.8

#327

Post by seunosewa »

gardnr wrote: post #6
adrian_b wrote: post #4

I assume that this announcement has been prompted by that of Moonshot AI, which has just announced a 2.8T parameter open-weights LLM, Kimi K3, to be published on Huggingface by 27 July. Now the response of Alibaba is that they will also publish soon a big open weights LLM, the 2.4T parameter Qwen 3.8. I wonder if Alibaba has always planned to make this big LLM open weights, or they have chosen to do this now, to bett…

It's hard to say what their motivation is. The Chinese firms seem to be working hard to commoditize intelligence which may be the most effective way to debase American frontier labs. And yeah: it also happens to be really good for humanity.

They are trying to make money. That's what firms in any capitalistic economy care about the most. Regardless of the government's presumed interference, the companies themselves are all trying to make money. All competing for subscriptions and API payments.

One aspect of this is making a name for yourself i.e. PR. Making a capable model open source helps a lot with that.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#328

Post by isuckatcoding »

SwellJoe wrote: post #34

Qwen is the most censored of the Chinese models in my testing, which makes me wonder in what other ways it is compromised. Open weights doesn't really reveal what's in there. And, in my tests, existing Qwen models are not at the pareto frontier of any metric; DeepSeek V4 Pro is better, faster, and much cheaper than Qwen 3.7 Max. (DeepSeek is also among the least censored of the Chinese models.) I guess we'll see if t…

I asked it similar questions of Chinese human rights and it started with “your premise is incorrect bla bla bla” and then it just redacted the whole thing and showed me an error code.

Try it yourself here: https://www.qwencloud.com/try-ai/chat

Re: Qwen 3.8

#329

Post by derektank »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #159
traceroute66 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does this explain open weights? They could easily take the same closed route like their American friends Because they are playing the Americans at their own game. What is the first thing an American company would do ? Spread the old American classic FUD ... "you can't used this closed tool because its run by the communists", right ? So you release it as open weights which is a win-win. Global adoption of the mo…

Alibaba isn’t really the Chinese government though, or are you saying Americans will think that ever since Jack Ma was harmonized?

I think trying to tease apart the private and public sector is very hard in China. Setting aside state owned enterprises, even nominally private companies that employ at least 3 CCP members are required by law to form a party committee within the company to represent party interests. And given the party functionally is the government, you have a situation where the government has representatives inside every major private company. There’s no obvious parallel to this in western countries.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#330

Post by knollimar »

mike_hearn wrote: post #311
oceanplexian wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard to say what their motivation is. Not for anyone who reads history. Back in the late 18th century, England was the world's top economy, in big part due to its textile industry. England had an export ban on the technology, but textile worker named Samuel Slater brought blueprints over (Supposedly in response to a bounty posted in a newspaper by the US government!). The technology diffused rapidly because th…

Really? The USA has built a ton of AI datacenters, exactly because it does have energy. The US IP system has flexed to allow training on all copyrighted content - compare that to Europe where such training is effectively forbidden. Britain doesn't even allow commercial web crawls! And the US has allowed the entire world to sign up and use its LLM APIs.

Doesn't China smelt most of the world's aluminum due to inexpensive energy?

I thought that was their thing

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