Questioning the Long-Term Prospects of Open-Weight LLMs
Alan_Silva_TI · reddit · 2026-07-06
The author discusses the long-term prospects of open-weight LLMs. The Qwen team recently released several new models, but seemingly hasn't yet released larger versions like 122B, 35B, 27B, and 9B. The author speculates that these models perform too well, prompting the team to hold off on open-sourcing them until even stronger models emerge.
The author points out that open-source models currently lag behind SOTA by about 2-4 months, worrying that this additional delay from Qwen could further widen the gap and potentially reshape the open-source landscape, similar to Meta-Llama. The focus is specifically on Qwen because it is the best model that can actually run on consumer-grade hardware.
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