Chinese open-weight AI models offer high capability at significantly lower costs than U.S. frontier systems, but face monetization and compute challenges, experts said at a Rest of World event in San Francisco.
In case anyone forgot, Meta was the pioneer of open weight models, with Llama 1 released/leaked February 2023.
They literally set the standard. Yes there was GPT-J before it, but basically everything in the open weights LLM space is derived from the Llama series, its footprint is still in newest Chinese models. The world was Meta’s oyster.
…And after one bad experiment, an experiment Zuckerberg allegedly meddled with (Llama 4), Zuck fired the whole Llama team, paid millions to a bunch of tech bros in their place, who proceeded to nothing for a good long while.
Muse Glimmer is obsolete, IMO.
Muse Spark is… not terrible? Its architecture (GQA + sliding window attention) is about a year or two out of date, but it… could be worse.
But this is just a reminder to anyone who thinks Zuck won’t find some way to feel insecure and fuck Muse up.
He will.
It is what he does. Zuck caused incalculable damage to his company, single-handedly, and he will do it again with zero repercussions.
Same with Musk. And Altman. Not to speak of Microsoft vacuuming up promising startups into a black hole. The U.S. AI industry was basically doomed from the beginning.
I know everyone hates on Meta but they just released an open weight 800B parameter model: Muse Spark Open.
Their smaller 30B parameter open model Muse Glimmer has also been out for a few weeks and is highly competitive with Qwen 3.8 27B.
So I hope we will start seeing more open models from US labs especially in the sub-20GB category which can be deployed on daily use machines.
In case anyone forgot, Meta was the pioneer of open weight models, with Llama 1 released/leaked February 2023.
They literally set the standard. Yes there was GPT-J before it, but basically everything in the open weights LLM space is derived from the Llama series, its footprint is still in newest Chinese models. The world was Meta’s oyster.
…And after one bad experiment, an experiment Zuckerberg allegedly meddled with (Llama 4), Zuck fired the whole Llama team, paid millions to a bunch of tech bros in their place, who proceeded to nothing for a good long while.
Muse Glimmer is obsolete, IMO.
Muse Spark is… not terrible? Its architecture (GQA + sliding window attention) is about a year or two out of date, but it… could be worse.
But this is just a reminder to anyone who thinks Zuck won’t find some way to feel insecure and fuck Muse up.
He will.
It is what he does. Zuck caused incalculable damage to his company, single-handedly, and he will do it again with zero repercussions.
Same with Musk. And Altman. Not to speak of Microsoft vacuuming up promising startups into a black hole. The U.S. AI industry was basically doomed from the beginning.