alt Hacker NewsThis is their hosted-only model, not an open weight model like they’ve become known for. They got a lot of good publicity for their open weight model releases, which was the goal. The hard part is pivoting from an open weight provider to being considered as a competitor to Claude and ChatGPT. Initial reactions are mostly anger from everyone who didn’t realize that the play along was to give away the smaller models as advertising, not because they were feeling generous.
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.
Replies
Ah, so that explains the recent wave of Qwen team-member departures.
I’m starting to wonder where the most is for any of these models.
Sure they are not cheap to train. But if open weight models continue to be trained and continue to become available on cheaper hardware, how do dedicated AI companies protect their margins?
> Initial reactions are mostly anger from everyone who didn’t realize that the play along was to give away the smaller models as advertising, not because they were feeling generous.
The naivety around this has been staggering quite frankly. All of a sudden, people thinking that meta etc are releasing free models because they believe in open access and distribution of knowledge. No, they just suck comparatively. There is nothing to sell. Using it to recruit and generate attention is the best play for them.
Opus was released in Feb 2026. Even though it feels like a long 2 months has passed, its' not really clear that they were developing this as a competitor to that product.
There's nothing really strange about not competing directly with the best, but rather showing whom you are as good as.
> 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.
There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best.
> not an open weight model like they’ve become known for.
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.