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've been waiting since November for 1, just 1*, model other than Claude than can reliably do agentic tool call loops. As long as the Chinese open models are chasing reasoning and benchmark maxxing vs. mid-2024 US private models, I'm very comfortable with somewhat ignoring these models.

(this isn't idle prognostication hinging on my personal hobby horse. I got skin in the game, I'm virtually certain I have the only AI client that is able to reliably do tool calls with open models in an agentic setting. llama.cpp got a massive contribution to make this happen and the big boys who bother, like ollama, are still using a dated json-schema-forcing method that doesn't comport with recent local model releases that can do tool calls. IMHO we're comfortably past a point where products using these models can afford to focus on conversational chatbots, thats cute but a commodity to give away per standard 2010s SV thinking)

* OpenAI's can but are a little less...grounded?...situated? i.e. it can't handle "read this file and edit it to do $X". Same-ish for Gemini, though, sometimes I feel like the only person in the world who actually waits for the experimental models to go GA, as per letter of the law, I shouldn't deploy them until then