Comment by hadlock

>The added cannibalization of releasing them is effectively zero, so the reputational benefits are likely to be worth it.

Nobody would be looking at Qwen if their ~30b class models weren't fantastically good, it's great advertising and builds significant goodwill with developers, who are going to be your biggest advocates.

The other thing is, all these models are already disposable grade, and in a year they'll all be outclassed by The Next Big Thing. "Open" models are less than 18 months behind SOTA right now and I can't imagine that will slow down much over the next two years, they may even begin to close the gap. Nobody even talks about llama 4 anymore despite only being a year old.