Qwen2.5-VL-32B: Smarter and Lighter

Big day for open source Chinese model releases - DeepSeek-v3-0324 came out today too, an updated version of DeepSeek v3 now under an MIT license (previously it was a custom DeepSeek license). https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/24/deepseek/

Pretty soon I won't be using any American models. It'll be a 100% Chinese open source stack.

The foundation model companies are screwed. Only shovel makers (Nvidia, infra companies) and product companies are going to win.

I still don't get where the money for new open source models is going to come from once setting investor dollars on fire is no longer a viable business model. Does anyone seriously expect companies to keep buying and running thousands of ungodly expensive GPUs, plus whatever they spend on human workers to do labelling/tuning, and then giving away the spoils for free, forever?

One possibility. Certain countries will always be able to produce open models cheaper than others. USA and Europe probably won't be able. However, due to national security and wanting to promote their models overseas instead of letting their competitors promote theirs, the governments of USA and Europe will subsidize models which will lead their competitors to (further?) subsidies. There is a promotional aspect as well, just like Hollywood governments will use their open source models to promote their ideology.

What's your take on why certain countries will have it cheaper and subsidies being at the forefront? An energy driven race to the bottom, is perhaps what you mean? I would suppose I have been seeing that China is ahead on their Renewables plan compared to the rest of the world, and they still have the lead on coal energy, so they'd likely be the winners on that front. But did you actually mean something else?

The problem with china is, they will have to figure out latency. Right now DeepSeek models hosted in china are having very high latency. It could because of DDoS and not strong enough infrastructure but probably also because of Great Firewall, runtime censoring prompt and servers physical location (big ping to US and EU countries).