Qwen VLo: From “Understanding” the World to “Depicting” It

It doesn't seem to have open weights, which is unfortunate. One of Qwen's strengths historically has been their open-weights strategy, and it would have been great to have a true open-weights competitor to 4o's autoregressive image gen. There are so many interesting research directions that are only possible if we can get access to the weights.

If Qwen is concerned about recouping its development costs, I suggest looking at BFL's Flux Kontext Dev release from the other day as a model: let researchers and individuals get the weights for free and let startups pay for a reasonably-priced license for commercial use.

It's also very clearly trained on OAI outputs, which you can tell from the orange tint to the images[0]. Did they even attempt to come up with their own data?

So it is trained off OAI, as closed off as OAI and most importantly: worse than OAI. What a bizarre strategy to gate-keep this behind an API.

[0]

https://qianwen-res.oss-cn-beijing.aliyuncs.com/Qwen-VLo/cas...

https://qianwen-res.oss-cn-beijing.aliyuncs.com/Qwen-VLo/cas...

https://qianwen-res.oss-cn-beijing.aliyuncs.com/Qwen-VLo/cas...

The way they win is to be open. I don't get why China is shutting down open source. It was a knife at the jugular of US tech dominance.

Both Alibaba and Tencent championed open source (Qwen family of models, Hunyuan family of models), but now they've shut off the releases.

There's totally a play where models become loss-leader for SaaS/PaaS/IaaS and where they extinguish your closed competition.

Imagine spreading your model so widely then making the terms: "do not use in conjunction with closed source models".