Comment by subhobroto

> What is the advantage to their companies to release them?

It's a distribution strategy. It costs something to serve the models - let's say $5/1M tokens.

If Qwen required $5 from anyone who was curious so you could even begin to test it out, a lot of people just wouldn't.

Now Qwen could offer a "free" tier, but it's infinitely cheaper to provide the weights and let people run it themselves including opening up the ability for anyone else on the planet to test it against other (open weight) models.

The costs to build the open weight models are sunk, but the costs to serve them, get them tested are not.

It's also precisely why the .NET SDK is free or the ESP32 SDK is free - they sell more Microsoft or ESP32 products.