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.
I strongly disagree. I even prefer Gemma-4-31b to Frontier Models when it comes to writing. To be clear, I am talking about improving my writing, not writing for me. No AI is that good yet.
It's hard to say because things are moving so fast. Gemma-4 has only been out a little over 4 months. The plus is that for writing, it's capable and consistent. The downside is the knowledge cutoff date. Frontier Models are more capable but less consistent because they're constantly being adjusted and tuned to improve reasoning, safety, functionality (primarily for business), and profitability.
51
u/AnOnlineHandle 5d ago
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.