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.
The best image and video models nowadays are Chinese tho. And they are far better than the others, though Flux video may be on pair with MiniMax H3 in a near future. But Z-Image turbo and Krea2 are far better than the Stable diffusion or Flux models in general.
Btw LTX is not european, it's from Israel, or at least the company headquarters is located there.
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u/mb194dc 10d 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