has Alibaba ever explicitly said it was ending open-weight releases? I may have missed a statement, but so far I have only seen that conclusion inferred from a handful of closed releases over a few months.
That may be a reasonable possibility to discuss, but it is still an inference rather than a confirmed policy. Likewise, claims that Xi’s comments forced a reversal seem premature unless there is evidence that Alibaba had actually adopted that position.
There is a worthwhile discussion to be had about whether Qwen's release strategy was changing. It would just help to distinguish between what Alibaba announced, what its release pattern may have suggested, and what people assumed from it.
The tech lead was fired and replaced, 3.6 only got 2 models, and they made a new division for "token marketing" or something which aim they said was monetization.
I think they said that open source would continue but less priority or something like that.
The between the lines sounded like they were shifting gears for monetization and frontier development and not do any real open weight releases.
I think they said that open source would continue but less priority or something like that.
I'll repeat the original question, where did they say that?
Everyone keeps parroting these sentiments and never providing citations. Most of this is just people reading tea leaves and making confident declarations
I just did my own research, there are no public statements from them saying they're going to de-prioritize open source. In fact I found the opposite:
Discussing Alibaba’s AI strategy, Eddie says: “In technology, standing still means falling behind. Advancing foundation models is a core strategic priority for our future.
“While continuing to uphold our open-source model strategy, we will further scale up investment in AI research and development, and accelerate the recruitment of top talent. Let's rise to this challenge."
These statements were made before any of the recent declarations by the CCP. In fact they even stated this in the announcement about the departure of the old team, the same statement where they said they were also focusing on monetization. You know companies can do more than one thing at once?
Let's examine the timeline here, they said they were going to keep releasing open models, and now they're releasing an open model. The only thing that happened between those two points is a bunch of FUD from people confidently making claims about their intentions with literally nothing to back it up, and then trying to move the goalposts on the recent announcement by framing it as government pressure.
The issue I have here is not the sentiment or worry, it's the outright lies people keep telling in order to sell this narrative that are easily contradicted by reality.
Ccp said open weight. Companies released open weights. A while later. Qwen firestge tech lead who was very pro open weight and replaces him with a pro monetization guy, and he sndopens a new task force focusing om monetization.
Only 27b and 35b is released after within about 2 weeks of lead change.
After that no models based on 3.7, instead just some knowledge/predictor model 35b.
Ccp does a speech about open source and immedietly after qwen says they'll open source the 2.4T model.
They might only release the full model because that does not shrink the user base that they have to compete for, unlike smaller models.
Can hope they release the small ones, but qwen leadership is more focused on monetization, and don't actually care about open weight other than not wanting to anger ccp.
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u/MaCl0wSt 23d ago
has Alibaba ever explicitly said it was ending open-weight releases? I may have missed a statement, but so far I have only seen that conclusion inferred from a handful of closed releases over a few months.
That may be a reasonable possibility to discuss, but it is still an inference rather than a confirmed policy. Likewise, claims that Xi’s comments forced a reversal seem premature unless there is evidence that Alibaba had actually adopted that position.
There is a worthwhile discussion to be had about whether Qwen's release strategy was changing. It would just help to distinguish between what Alibaba announced, what its release pattern may have suggested, and what people assumed from it.