alt Hacker NewsI thought Qwen was releasing open-weight because China can't compete with America (because of people's privacy concerns), so the only thing they could do is salt the ground economically with open models, and make sure everybody loses.
Apparently that wasn't actually the play here.
Qwen is actually a pretty strong player in the Chinese market. There is an implied "salt the ground" play but it's mostly from hardware makers, who are trying to keep the big AI players honest and also stand to gain if local inference becomes popular.