Comment by springtimesun

I feel like this is a marketing miss. If they had held their announcement until the model was released, I would have grabbed it and started running it through my benchmarks. It probably doesn’t get a place in the rotation based on their own description of its performance, but now the weights live on the server, I’m probably following them on HF and I will remember to check in every time I ls the models folder. With the announcement only, none of that happens and I’m likely to forget about this by the time it actually gets released.

The email harvest move just doesn’t fit where we/they are in the cycle. There are established players and a buffet of models to choose from (plus a ton of empty hype). The first move at this point for any new entrant should be to show, not tell. Even an API only release with the promise to open weight would be better (actually probably all around better since most people can’t run this locally).

I wish this lab and all the labs releasing the best. It’s a brutal landscape to sink millions of dollars into for a guaranteed “behind x model from a year ago” evaluation. But, I do believe there is genuine innovation left to uncover.