Look at meta, while they went from open to closed, they got better as time went on

I mean, the obvious way it's better than the Chinese open-weight models is literally the fact that it's not Chinese and is therefore less likely to be banned or restricted. Chinese models cannot be used on certain government systems already in the US, and regulators are actively considering expanding these restrictions more generally (such as adding it to the Entity List).

You don't just magically do better than everyone else on every metric on your first go at something. Doing worse than others and refining is how pretty much everything works.

The reality is they trained a model and it looks worse on benchmarks than Qwen or GLM. I don’t see how sharing the weights hurts anyone? Even when Llama 4 came out and it was a dumpster fire, it didn’t affect me personally.

> That only means their training regime is inferior if their predecessors did so much more with so much less

Hard to imagine how that wouldn’t be the case. They probably missed the boat on distilling Claude (or their lawyers said no), they probably didn’t hire an army of math PhDs to write reasoning traces, they don’t have millions of DAUs in a coding agent to train from, and they probably have less money, less experience, fewer top tier researchers, and fewer resources for experiments. They are an underdog without a doubt.

None of that means they shouldn’t release their model.

I wonder if that's an indication that they are not distilling which limits how good they can get.