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.

> One of Qwen's strengths historically has been their open-weights strategy [...] let researchers and individuals get the weights for free and let startups pay for a reasonably-priced license for commercial use.

But if you're suggesting they should do open weights, doesn't that mean people should be able to use it freely?

You're effectively suggesting "trial-weights", "shareware-weights", "academic-weights" or something like that rather than "open weights", which to me would make it seem like you can use them for whatever you want, just like with "open source" software. But if it misses a large part of what makes "open source" open source, like "use it for whatever you want", then it kind of gives the wrong idea.

I am personally in favor of true open source (e.g. Apache 2 license), but the reality is that these model are expensive to develop and many developers are choosing not to release their model weights at all.

I think that releasing the weights openly but with this type of dual-license (hence open weights, but not true open source) is an acceptable tradeoff to get more model developers to release models openly.