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  • Hacker News
  • 2.4 Trillion parameters with open weights releasing next week? The open-source community is going to need a collective GoFundMe just to buy enough VRAM to host this monster.
    by khanhnguyen8386
  • Kimi K3 is about the same
    by jjice
  • AWS Bedrock still lacks the support for the latest open weights models like GLM 5.2, DSV4 Flash 0731, Kimi K3 etc. Even they only support Qwen 3 which is a very old model. Any specific reasons they are reluctant to support open weights models?
    by tesnorindian
  • If I recall most of the open weight models have provisions about large scale commercial hosting. So probably licensing issues.
    by kcb
  • I was wondering the same thing. Maybe it’s a licensing issue. Or the models are too big and there isn’t enough demand. But size is not a solid argument because they also don’t support Qwen3.6 27B and 35B-A3B, especially since they just added Gemma 31B and 26B-A4B.
    by roosgit
  • AWS Bedrock do support many, older, open weight models. Perhaps there is a reluctance to support anything more powerful that would compete with their partner Anthropic?

    In practice I'm not sure how big a deal this is - Bedrock is not the cheapest or best provider (try Fireworks AI or DeepInfra who do support more recent models), and would seem to be of more interest to corporate users who already have an AWS account.

    Perhaps also of relevance the US government is hassling US companies that are using Chinese models (currently DoorDash, previously AirBnB & Cursor), which may limit demand for corporate use.

    by HarHarVeryFunny
  • 3.8 27b is the real news here
    by boredatoms
  • real
    by shockembopper
  • Can't wait, been running the 3.6 locally and it's been a boon.
    by btbuildem
  • Once OpenAI and Anthropic are public, every such announcement will become a reliable sell signal
    by adi2907
  • It'll sell after 1-2 times, then the market will get jaded and ignore.
    by aurareturn
  • Only the ones that beat expectations
    by _jayhack_
  • It's not so simple, if such a headline can get them closer to the regulatory capture they want to lock in American businesses and forbid them from using Chinese AI.
    by int32_64
  • US AI labs really rub me the wrong way, especially with the doom and scare tactics they use. Both Altman and Dario keep talking about how AI will replace workers and how we should regulate LLMs for national security, Dario’s main point.

    LLMs are useful. We can all see that in agentic coding. But replacing everyone’s job? Hardly. And what’s with the scare tactic of trying to get the US government to ban foreign models?

    LLMs are useful, and dare I say they’re on par with the internet. Making them cheaper and affordable is good for everyone. The fear mongering from Anthropic and OpenAI looks like an attempt to corner the US market into using only US models so they can keep the profits, especially since China has proven that LLMs are a commodity. US AI labs should work on making LLMs cheaper or better harness. Altman and Dario are not trustworthy.

    by MangoCoffee
  • Can they still go public ? MiniMax M3 Pro is also coming, then DeepSeek-v4-Pro GA, then GLM5.5. There will only be bad news for them in the coming few weeks/months.
    by ycui7
  • Agree, I don't necessarily see a strong argument favoring OpenAI or Anthropic here. In the interest of perspective, can anyone (perhaps playing devil's advocate) give one?

    The open models are now good enough for what I want to do with them, let alone any future improvements. And factoring in efficiency gains, a model in the ~70b range starting to satisfy my needs would completely obviate the need to pay others for inference. This does not seem far-fetched to me, comparing with where open models were at this time last year. What am I missing?

    by gr_norm
  • > Today, we are officially releasing Qwen 3.8-Max, the most capable model in the Qwen family to date. This also marks the first time we will open-source the weights of a Qwen-Max-class model — the open weights will be released next week.

    I don't understand. That's dated today, but:

    https://twitter.com/alibaba_qwen/status/2078759124914098291

    > Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon! [...] You don't have to wait to test it. Just now, the Qwen3.8-Max-Preview made its debut on Alibaba’s Token Plan, Qoder, and QoderWork.

    That was on July 19th. I used it to draw this pelican: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/20/afraid-of-chinese-mode...

    So what are they releasing today?

    by simonw
  • they releasing Max.
    by telemaxs
  • ... other comments were right, this is the full qwen3.8-max model, two weeks ago was the qwen3.8-max-preview release.

    Here's a pelican I just got out of the new model. It took 11 minutes and forgot the wheels! https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht... (scroll to bottom)

    The reasoning trace is pretty great:

    > More additions: basket with fish in it? Cute detail — a fish poking out of a basket on the handlebars! This adds charm and pelican context.

    If the price is $2/$6 that cost me 17 cents: https://www.llm-prices.com/#it=90&ot=29734&ic=2&oc=6

    by simonw
  • My understanding is that these "preview" models are usually earlier RL checkpoints, and that "official release" happens when they're happy with the training run?

    I believe they mentioned around the preview announcement that they'd be releasing improvements to capability, which I assume means continued training.

    by Jowsey
  • July 19th post mentions “Max-Preview” vs. today’s post dropping the “Preview”. Unclear what changed if anything though.. Maybe broader availability or it’s a slightly improved checkpoint
    by bloomsa
  • It was a matter of time for China to catch up with the US. In terms of infrastructure, manufacturing, and engineering workforce, China has the upperhand and I foresee them becoming the SOTA leaders. Maybe if the US wasn't so busy gatekeeping and keeping things proprietary, they would've had more trust from the open source community.
    by docheinestages
  • > trust from the open source community

    volunteers in the open source community use whatever is easiest and cheap.

    open weights is not open source. there is no "trust".

    by villish
  • Also give it to Chinese labs for the vision of going open source and open models to compete. Apart from their great models, I quite like how they publish papers of their research too.
    by Oras
  • First and foremost, China isn't energy-limited like the US is. A modern grid, lost of cheap power coming online every day. The worlds most advance ultra-high voltage transport links are tying the deserts in the west to the cities in the south.

    It probably sucks for you if the proposed powerline goes through your house, but the need of the many come first.

    Having cheap and plentiful power is a huge market advantage. It was one of the factors driving Norway out of poverty 100 years ago.

    by perbu
  • Whilst these coding models improve, they seem to cater for multiple languages, and for many, a trimmed-down LLM that supports just one language would be fantastic. This would be smaller, more able to run on the hardware people have at home, realistically (even on the CPU). Having one LLM that knows assembler, java, bain, C etc is neat, but when you only work and use one language at a time, it would be kinda neat to have those broken out into dedicated, smaller LLMs. After all Qwen3.8-Max handles over 90 programming languages - ask any programmer to name a list of computer languages and if they get over 20, they are doing well.
    by Zenst
  • Teaching model to code in say python does indeed increase its effectiveness in other seemingly unrelated areas. On the other hand I remember that early models of ChatGPT were great in chess notation and later models aren’t as good as OpenAI doesn’t prioritize this now
    by kwikiel
  • I think you'd want to remove e.g. knowledge of harry potter universe and ancient egypt. Training on a bunch of high quality java code bases is still likely to improve your python model.
    by zild3d
  • That's not how LLMs work. If you're talking about number of parameters, you wouldn't be able to reduce the size much by "removing" support for other languages.
    by ucha
  • I believe the knowledge of multiple languages brings something onto the table that having narrow language knowledge does not. The LLM will be able to better generalize a problem, apply universal concepts and avoid mistakes that would otherwise be too "echo chambery". Even as a human, knowing multiple languages has made me better at my primary language.
    by Achshar