What i think the forseeable for open models will be

The realization hit when Qwen announced they'll be releasing 3.8 as open weights at >2t weights. I think China strategically released open models in multiple phases, and they're now in their final phase.

Phase 1:

Dump small but very capable open models (especially during the Qwen 3.5 era) to get power users to stop using frontier models in favor of local models.

Phase 2:

Dump really large models, like Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2 to get larger organisations to switch over from American frontier models. These are the organisations that can afford the large server hardware to actually host these models. When such an organisation has installed a model, a frontier closed source frontier lab has basically lost them as a customer forever.

I think it's very unlikely we'll see a Chinese open source model in the 9b-35b (runnable on 32-64gb range) until atleast the end of the year. Nearly every person that wanted to switch to local models has likely done so already, or was already planning on doing it.

Now they're targeting the organisations that are the current target audience for these frontier labs.

I always kind of feared it would come to this when Qwen 3.7 wasn't released quickly. I really hope i'm wrong on this!