they just released the first small models that i would consider even vaguely articulate for edge inference involving a human. maybe they want to do a mistral and raise a kajillion and work from their home town?

Subject submitted yesterday fwiw:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47236390

I feel someone just gave them a huge $$$ offer that they couldn't say no too. Given Elon Musk is praising their efforts, and he lost a lot of his original XAI team recently, my money is on Elon.

This feels like a typical sociopathic corporate scenario with mushroom management - let a bunch of nerds develop something new/exciting outside mainstream corporate culture, then once it becomes good enough jump in, cut them off and harvest whatever they produced while reaping all benefits/credits for yourself, then live off mediocre subsequent releases for a while while blaming remaining team members for future failures.

From what I read, he was fired.

Which is insane. Obviously he isnt the only lead at alibaba, but qwen as consequence lost many talented people by doing this. It will negatively impact the Qwen team.

Qwen4 is going to flop like Lllama 4.

I hope those who just quit form their own new lab and start building again.

The Qwen team has been putting out great releases lately. I hope that they can continue on that path despite this.

Perhaps forced to move over to building military and intelligence models.

big corp politics.

qwen started as the NLP team of Tongyi dept, which was part of the algorithm & model offerings from Alibaba-Cloud (aliyun)

https://tongyi.aliyun.com/

- qwen series for nlp

- wan series for cv/video

- fun series for ASR and TTS

- icss for AI customer service

- lingma for coding

- xingchen for metaverse hype

- tingwu for podcast/notebooklm

Now that's the awkward part: qwen was too successful, a team had more influence than Tongyi and even Aliyun, obviously they started to develop multi-modal capabilities overlapping other team's work, even with their own app, very vertical integrated.

But qwen didn't contribute much revenue or DAU/MAU except fame amoung AI communities. And GPUs were scarce, Alibaba had to balance free open source models and customer use.

In a better world, alibaba might just as well split qwen into an independent entity and IPO it.

I like the art in this article.

Boss says, back to home softies, did you guys really think all you had to do was show up, play on the computer, eat yum yums, and suddenly you have all the money and women?

Software hard mob.

Edit mob: most of you guys paired up with our partners. Pre-martial sex might not have been such a great idea ! (mob loves you all dearly)

Especially with more than one partner! In dad's time when everybody from same village, maybe okay, now, maybe not great idea. Not a great idea to let our MOBinamls into your homes either.

We did dog. Dog is a domestic military black op. Mob says this is very untrue, WE did not do dog, but we are very suspicious as to why dog is in home as well :thonk: