Alibaba from beginning had some series of models that are always closed-weights (*-max, *-plus, *-turbo etc. but also QvQ), It's not a new development, nor does it prevent their open models. And the VL models are opened after 2-3 months of GA in API.
Hunyuan Image 2.0, which is of Flux quality but has ~20 milliseconds of inference time, is being withheld.
Hunyuan 3D 2.5, which is an order of magnitude better than Hunyuan 3D 2.1, is also being withheld.
I suspect that now that they feel these models are superior to Western releases in several categories, they no longer have a need to release these weights.
> I suspect that now that they feel these models are superior to Western releases in several categories, they no longer have a need to release these weights.
Yes that I can totally believe. Standard corporation behaviour (Chinese or otherwise).
I do think DeepSeek would be an exception to this though. But they lack diversity in focus (not even multimodal yet).
What do you mean Tencent just shut off the Hunyuan releases? There was another open weights release just today: https://huggingface.co/tencent/Hunyuan-A13B-Instruct . And the latest Qwen and DeepSeek open weight releases were under 2 months ago, there hasn't been enough time for them to finish a new version since then.
Deepseek and Alibaba just published their froniter models in open weights weeks ago. And they happen to be the leading open weights models in the world. What are you talking about?
Alibaba just shut off the Qwen releases
Tencent just shut off the Hunyuan releases
Bytedance just released Seedream, but it's closed
It's seems like it's over.
They're still clearly training on Western outputs, though.
I still suspect that the strategic thing to do would be to become 100% open and sell infra/service.