Open Weights

Two stamped forms resting in an inbox tray on a desk, beside an empty space where an approval certificate would sit

Filed, Not Approved: MiniMax and DeepSeek Under China's Export Draft.

Chinese state media reported today that DeepSeek and MiniMax completed registration under China’s interim AI export rules and carried on releasing open weights and licensing overseas. It is being shared as regulatory approval. It is a filing, it comes from one source, and it partly answers the question we left open last week.

7,721 Likes in 18 Days. We Checked Who Gave Them.

A post on r/LocalLLaMA this morning said a Hugging Face organisation reached the trending page on farmed likes. We pulled a sample of the accounts behind its biggest model and compared them with the accounts behind a model we know is popular. One measure we tried showed nothing. The other showed everything.

A measuring gauge on a workbench with its marker set near the far end of the scale, far past a row of small components

The Threshold in China's AI Export Draft Is 2 Trillion Parameters.

China published draft export controls today covering 23 AI technologies, and the open-weight world spent the afternoon working out whether the models it depends on are about to stop appearing. The proposed size threshold answers most of that. It sits around 280 times above the image model we checked on launch day.

A sealed envelope lying open on a workbench beside a bound rulebook that remains closed

Qwen 2.1 Commercial Terms, Reported: 300,000 Images a Month Free.

Somebody emailed the licensing address printed in the Qwen Research License and posted the reply: three tiers, with the first 300,000 images a month costing nothing. If that is accurate it covers essentially every individual using the model. None of it is published anywhere, which is the part to hold on to.

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Prism's MIT Licence Covers the Weights. What You Can Download Today Is 360p.

Tencent Hunyuan and Fudan put out a video and audio model that generates both in one pass, and the headline all day has been native 2K under an MIT licence. We read the licence file and listed the repository. The licence is better than people are saying. The checkpoints are smaller than people are saying. Nobody has run it yet.

A heavy machine sitting intact on a bench while the small bracket that connected it to everything else is missing

A ComfyUI Node Pack Vanished This Week. 18 of Our 21 Could Too.

Someone opened a tab on Monday to try a ComfyUI node pack, came back on Tuesday, and the repository was a 404. Minutes later the author’s entire GitHub account was gone. The model weights it wrapped are still sitting on Hugging Face, untouched. Most people back up the wrong half of their install, and we were doing it too.

A small compact machine on a workbench with a paper tag tied to it, beside larger older machines with no tags

Qwen-Image-2.1 Fits on Far Less Hardware. It Also Dropped Apache 2.0.

Qwen released a new image model today at 7.1 billion parameters, roughly a third the size of everything else in the line, with ComfyUI support the same afternoon. Every earlier Qwen image release was Apache 2.0. This one is research and evaluation only, and we read the licence file rather than the thread about it.

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Open Models Are 4.4 Months Behind the Frontier. That Is Not Your Gap.

A Mozilla analysis put the open to closed capability gap at about 4.4 months, and it went round the local AI world as good news. It is good news. It is also being read as something it does not say, because the open model doing the catching up is 2.78 trillion parameters and will never see the inside of your computer.

An incomplete machine with a missing component, and many hands fitting a newly made part into the gap

A Music Model Shipped Without a Key Piece. Strangers Built It in Five Days.

YuE2 landed last week, and what happened next is the best argument for open weights we have seen in a while. Quantised to 8 GB by day two. The missing encoder trained from scratch by a stranger on day five. A LoRA trainer the same day. One thing almost nobody is mentioning, though, and it matters if you plan to earn anything.

A large pile of model files with a small number of them selected and moved to a separate protected shelf

People Are Panic Downloading Models Before It Is Too Late. Here Is What Actually Deserves the Disk.

Someone asked this morning which models to back up now that NVIDIA is buying Hugging Face. We told people to keep local copies a week ago, and four days ago we wrote about our own disk filling up and breaking our publishing. Both of those are true at once, so here is the version that reconciles them.