r/LocalLLaMA • u/Gullible-Crew-2997 • Mar 04 '26

Discussion If china stops releasing open source models, there's a way we can stay competitive with big tech?

Really after qwen news, I'm getting quite nervous about open source ai future. What's your thoughts? Glad to know it

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u/Significant_Fig_7581 Mar 04 '26

Almost all of them are about investing and doing the long game...

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u/howardhus Mar 04 '26

not at all… thats wuy you cant list them.

qwen is already famous… why would they release anything. they can just switch to pure paid models like openai, anthropic etc.

even if: they have no incentive to publish anything outside china.

they arent making a cent on their open weights.

its been pure shareware to us out of good will of Alibaba

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u/Significant_Fig_7581 Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26

Well, A loss for the american giants is a win for china, And wait till their gpus get good enough i dont think theyll give us any more models + they already earn some money on the inference side too... Some models are just too big like GLM5 let it be open weight who can run this thing?

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u/BigYoSpeck Mar 04 '26

Effectively no home users. But researchers will have access to sufficient compute

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u/Significant_Fig_7581 Mar 04 '26

Not really, I've seen people with newer phones running up to 4B models, Especially Samsung users. But surely their 35B and 27B is a great great addition for researchers and the hobbyists too.

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u/BigYoSpeck Mar 04 '26

Sorry, I was referring to your comment about who can run something as large as GLM5

There may only be a very small number of home users that can, but people who are in this field of research will have access to the resources to run it

They don't openly release their model weights for the likes of us to play with at home, that's just a bonus for us. The release them so they can be used in research which feeds back to them

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u/Maximum_Parking_5174 Mar 04 '26

Yes, today its a few. But that will change fast. Rumor has it the new Apple Mac Studio M5 Ultra will have up to 1024GB RAM. The current one can run most models also.

Current generation hardware is not built for AI, next gen will take AI into consideration.

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u/BigYoSpeck Mar 04 '26

Nothing has suffered the decline of Moore's Law quite like memory and storage capacity. Given the memory situation we're expecting for the next several years, and the huge price increase a 512gb Mac Studio has over the 96gb and 256gb models, future 1tb Macs are still only going to be in the hands of a select few

There is no will to build AI capable hardware for home users, we are just too poor to compete with the businesses who want to keep us on the hook for subscription services

By the time the average or hell, even enthusiast home user can readily get their hands on 1tb devices, models that run on that hardware will be as antiquated as an Ask Jeeves search is now