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.

Here's what came out this month, with links to my notes on each one:

• Moonshot Kimi-K2-Instruct - 11th July, 1 trillion parameters
• Qwen Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507 - 21st July, 235 billion
• Qwen Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct - 22nd July, 480 billion
• Qwen Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507 - 25th July, 235 billion
• Z.ai GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air - 28th July, 355 and 106 billion
• Qwen Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 - 29th July, 30 billion
• Qwen Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507 - 30th July, 30 billion
• Qwen Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct - 31st July, 30 billion (released after I first posted this note)

Notably absent from this list is DeepSeek, but that's only because their last model release was DeepSeek-R1-0528 back in April.

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.