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.

The era of open weights from China appears to be over for some reason. It's all of a sudden and seems to be coordinated.

Alibaba just shut off the Qwen releases

Tencent just shut off the Hunyuan releases

Bytedance just released Seedream, but it's closed

It's seems like it's over.

They're still clearly training on Western outputs, though.

I still suspect that the strategic thing to do would be to become 100% open and sell infra/service.

> Alibaba just shut off the Qwen releases

Alibaba from beginning had some series of models that are always closed-weights (*-max, *-plus, *-turbo etc. but also QvQ), It's not a new development, nor does it prevent their open models. And the VL models are opened after 2-3 months of GA in API.

> Tencent just shut off the Hunyuan releases

Literally released one today: https://huggingface.co/tencent/Hunyuan-A13B-Instruct

Hunyuan Image 2.0, which is of Flux quality but has ~20 milliseconds of inference time, is being withheld.

Hunyuan 3D 2.5, which is an order of magnitude better than Hunyuan 3D 2.1, is also being withheld.

I suspect that now that they feel these models are superior to Western releases in several categories, they no longer have a need to release these weights.