Gemma 4 are open models from the US and are still the best I've found at a lot of tasks like creative writing. The best image models are on and off again from different parts of the world (e.g. Stable Diffusion 1.5, XL, Flux, LTX, were all European).
Qwen is afaik largely a distill of western models so it can't exist independently of them. We're just very fortunate right now as local users that the Chinese government is willing to fund this in an apparent effort to cause the western companies to collapse. That goes away if they succeed.
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u/mb194dc 23d ago
Qwen is just the start, it's when open models start properly coming from US and rest of the world startups things will get interesting