They've been around a couple years. This is the first model that has really broken into the anglosphere.
Keep a tab on aihubmix, the Chinese openrouter, if you want to stay on top of the latest models. They keep track of things like the Baichuan, Doubao, baai (beijing academy), Meituan, 01.AI (yi), xiaomi, etc...
Much larger chinese coverage than openrouter
>first model that has really broken into the anglosphere.
Do you know of a couple of interesting ones that haven't yet?
> This is the first model that has really broken into the anglosphere.
Before Step 3.5 Flash, I've been hearing a lot about ACEStep as being the only open weights competitor to Suno.