"[...] In the coming days, we will also open-source smaller-scale variants, reaffirming our commitment to accessibility and community-driven innovation. [...]"
In other words, like GP said, this Qwen3.6-Plus model is not open-weight unlike the other Qwen models.
Almost all means there have been ones before that were not open. So, no contradiction there.
Please send the download link for qwen 3.5-plus.
Also, who cares? If you have the hardware to run a ~400b model i don’t think you count as a home user anymore.
However, my hope is that there will be at least somewhat competitive big and open models as well, from an ethical/ideological perspective. These things were trained on data that was provided by people without their consent, so they should at least be be publicly accessible or even public domain.
Comparing to Opus 4.5 instead of the current 4.6 and other last-gen models is clearly an attempt to deceive, which isn’t winning them any points either.
I think there is a moderately large market for models like this that aren’t quite SOTA level but can be served up much cheaper. I don’t know how successful they’ll be in the race to the bottom in this market niche, though. Most users of cheap API tokens are not loyal to any brand and will change providers overnight each time someone releases a slightly better model.
There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best.
There are a lot of data science problems that benefit from running the dataset through an LLM, which becomes bottlenecked on per-token costs. For these you take a sample subset and run it against multiple providers and then do a cost versus accuracy tradeoff.
The market for API tokens is not just people using OpenCode and similar tools.
For direct user interaction or coding problems, perhaps. But as API calls get cheaper, it becomes more realistic to use them for completely automated workflows against data-sets, or as sub-agents called from expensive SOTA models.
For example, in Claude, using Opus as an orchestrator to call Sonnet sub-agents, is a popular usage "hack." That only gets more powerful, as the Sonnet equivalent model gets cheaper. Now you can spawn entire teams of small specialized sub-agents with small context windows but limited scope.
At least from my experience and friends of mine, we use OpenRouter for cases where we want to use smaller LLMs like Qwen, but when I've used ChatGPT and Claude, I use those APIs directly.
Coding is a rung on the ladder of model capability. Frontier models will grow to take on more capabilities, while smaller more focused models start becoming the economical choice for coding
Right, they state that they'll release "smaller" variants openly at some point, with few details as to what that means. Will there be a ~300B variant as with Qwen 3.5? The blog post doesn't say.
Like Qwen local for it’s privacy, but I trust the privacy of Google/OpenAI/Anthropic more than alibaba.
None should be trusted, unless you are running them locally.
us actually has laws around this and they arent sharing very much with thr us gov today. china shares 100% as required by law. and neither care much about "how long do i cook eggs for", but they do care about code generation a lot.
It's not that, it's about relative risk to your own life. Asking questions about "DEI" for example is much more likely to have adverse effects on your life if you ask Grok or an OpenAI chatbot, though still not that likely.
And the US government has repeatedly shown that it is very interested in collecting all the data available, not unlike China. In China this is simply done in the open while the US has a veneer of protection for citizens. But where the data collection is forbidden by law they either ignore the law or ask another five eyes member to do the spying and share the results. Both are well documented
As always, we'll have to try and see how it performs in the real world but the open weight models of Qwen were pretty decent for some tasks so still excited to see what this brings.
I can remember how good Opus 4.5 was. If I'm considering using this, it's most informative to me to compare to the model it's closest to that I have familiarity with.
I'm obviously not switching to this if I want the best model. I'm switching if I'm hopeful that the smaller versions are close to it, or if I want to have more options for providers, or for any other reasons unrelated to getting the highest quality responses possible.
srmatto•1h ago
thegeomaster•1h ago
FuckButtons•34m ago
kgeist•9m ago
Maybe the hypothesis is that if a developer is fine with the intelligence of smaller open-weights variants, it's not worth spending scarce compute on them - they can just run those on their own hardware, probably not much economic gain for Alibaba here? And at the same time, if such a developer later wants more intelligence when they scale, they're more likely to switch to a larger model in the same model family (similar quirks, less prompt tweaking), and that's where Alibaba can start charging more? Basically, lack of compute in China forces them to focus on a few larger clients that need maximum intelligence, and open-weights models are like a free trial that they don't have to pay for.
kgeist•24m ago
- Qwen3.5-Plus
- Qwen3-Max
- Qwen2.5-Max
etc. Nothing really changed so far.
Aurornis•1h ago