Simon Willison’s Weblog
Something that has become undeniable this month is that the best available open weight models now come from the Chinese AI labs.
I continue to have a lot of love for Mistral, Gemma and Llama but my feeling is that Qwen, Moonshot and Z.ai have positively smoked them over the course of July.
The only janky license among them is Kimi K2, which uses a non-OSI-compliant modified MIT. Qwen's models are all Apache 2 and Z.ai's are MIT.
The larger Chinese models all offer their own APIs and are increasingly available from other providers. I've been able to run versions of the Qwen 30B and GLM-4.5 Air 106B models on my own laptop.
I can't help but wonder if part of the reason for the delay in release of OpenAI's open weights model comes from a desire to be notably better than this truly impressive lineup of Chinese models.
