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.