431–440 of 793 posts
Always nice to see more open-weights in the heavy model class. I can only hope this trend continues, causing OpenAI and Anthropic to crash and burn.
As much as I dislike 'em, this sounds mean spirited. And Alibaba admits in this very tweet that Fable is next level (it is).
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.
Google: Chromium, Kubernetes, Android, TensorFlow
Meta: React, PyTorch, Llama
Microsoft: VS Code, TypeScript, .NET Core
LinkedIn: Kafka
Slotted in along these, an analogous explanation is that Alibaba needs Qwen internally (vs depending on an American company), but licensing is not part of their revenue strategy. (As a cloud vendor, they can make money on inference. The strategy is very similar to the US hyperscalers ex-Google.)
Joel Spolsky wrote in depth about this notion of commoditizing one's complement in 2002[1] using tech examples stretching back into the '80s.
1 - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
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…
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The big decelerationist threat is a sudden reduction in competition. If either OpenAI or Anthropic drop out or the open weights stuff is banned/becomes uncompetitive then the motivation and tolerance for taking risks with the larger training runs tanks. The closest we've seen to this in tech in recent decades was iOS vs Android, where Android only really was competitive for a very short window of time (approx 4.x) an…
I have to use both big mobile OSs for work and have since 2009. As a result I have been able to be a bit of a gadfly and switch between phone OSs a few times for personal use. I have switched three times to iOS for a year or so, cause I liked the iteration of the iPhone at the time. 4, 6s, X. I have always gone back to Android because it seemed so much better and now I don't plan to switch again. As an end user, Sams…
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…
China will always benefit from a broader adoption of their models as hidden propaganda machines.
Eventually with several services relying in those tools, their answers will always be more friendly to China.
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…
> In any case, from this competition in LLMs, we win. Do we really though? Everyone is wasting resources doing almost exactly the same thing. Climate loses, we lose.
About climate, I think you overplay it. China is already investing heavily in nuclear, and we should be doing the same.
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Can you tell me more about deepseek? I paid $2 for deepseek api, put the key in void editor and made a crypto tool in html. It turned out to be around 67kb. I used sample files in CSV that were a few hundred lines. It spent around $1.8 in the hour or two or light coding and follow up bugs. Is it really really this much? I can't imagine spending a month using it for a day job, it would cost more than the salary so wha…
My 2 weeks with DeepSeek V4: Pro is ~50% more expensive than Flash. Both need babysitting. Plan, split in small tasks, give it docs, types, tests, linter, best practice examples, etc. Always start a new session when starting a task. Do regular manual sanity checks, and tell it to find issues in the codebase. I pay like $1,50 per day for Pro.
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I feel like there could also be a simpler explanation. Why does a debian contributor make debian free, why do they work on this thing anyone can use? Is it because linux and debian hate windows and iOS and want to see american fail? No, it's because most debian contributors believe software source code, information, should be free, users should be free to modify the code they use, and that they're building a thing th…
Please don't conflate a volunteer effort with no expected economic gain with a very well funded company (or fleet of companies). With the CCP's highly successful track record with subsuming other markets, Occam's razor applies to why they're doing this.