Open weights

14 entries between July 2022 and August 2026, 1 turning point.

Turning points

  1. Stability AI publishes the Stable Diffusion weights

    Stability AI, working with LMU Munich researchers, RunwayML, EleutherAI and LAION, published the full weights of Stable Diffusion on Hugging Face on 22 August 2022 under the CreativeML OpenRAIL-M license. The model ran on a single consumer graphics card.

Every entry

  1. Meta releases Muse Glimmer under an Apache 2.0 license

    Meta released Muse Glimmer on 10 August 2026, a 30-billion-parameter multimodal model distilled from its closed Muse Spark model and published on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0. Compressed to about 4-bit precision, it runs on a single consumer GPU or Mac under 20GB.

  2. Alibaba announces Qwen3.8-Max, its largest model to date

    Alibaba announced Qwen3.8-Max on 3 August 2026 with 2.4 trillion parameters, about 95 billion active at a time through a sparse mixture of experts, a context window up to 1 million tokens, and native text, image and video input. Weights were scheduled to follow a week later.

  3. Anthropic sets out its position on open-weight models

    Anthropic published its position on open-weight AI models on 27 July 2026. Chief executive Dario Amodei said open-weight models without dangerous capabilities are a public good; the company backed chip export limits and mandatory safety testing rather than a ban.

  4. Alibaba splits Qwen into open and proprietary tiers

    Alibaba released Qwen3.6 in April 2026, a 35-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 3 billion active parameters, under the Apache 2.0 license. It kept the more capable Qwen3.6-Plus and Qwen3.5-Omni proprietary, reachable only through Qwen’s apps and Alibaba Cloud.

  5. Mistral releases Small 4 and joins Nvidia’s Nemotron Coalition

    Mistral AI released Mistral Small 4 on 16 March 2026, a 119-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 6 billion active parameters, a 256,000-token context window and an Apache 2.0 license. It joined Nvidia’s Nemotron Coalition the same day.

  6. Alibaba’s Qwen chief resigns and its AI work is consolidated

    Lin Junyang, head of Alibaba’s Qwen model division, resigned in early March 2026, shortly after the release of Qwen3.5. On 17 March Alibaba formed a new AI unit, Alibaba Token Hub, placing Qwen and related work under chief executive Eddie Wu.

  7. DeepSeek releases R1, an open-weight reasoning model

    The Chinese laboratory DeepSeek released R1 on 20 January 2025, an open-weight model trained with reinforcement learning to work through problems step by step. It matched OpenAI’s o1 on several benchmarks at a small fraction of the reported training and inference cost.

  8. Meta releases Llama 3.1 with a 405-billion-parameter model

    Meta released Llama 3.1 on 23 July 2024, including a 405-billion-parameter model it called the largest openly available foundation model to date, with a 128,000-token context window. Meta said it matched GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on knowledge, math, and tool-use benchmarks.

  9. Meta releases Llama 3 under an open license

    Meta released the first Llama 3 models, at 8 billion and 70 billion parameters, on 18 April 2024 under a license permitting most commercial use. Meta said the 70B model beat comparable models, including Claude 3 Sonnet, on human evaluations across twelve use cases.

  10. Meta releases Llama 2 with weights free for commercial use

    Meta released Llama 2 on 18 July 2023 at 7, 13 and 70 billion parameters, with the weights and code free for research and for most commercial use. Microsoft was named Meta’s preferred partner, and the models were distributed through Azure, Amazon Web Services and Hugging Face.

  11. Meta releases LLaMA; the weights leak online within days

    Meta AI published LLaMA on 24 February 2023, a family of language models at 7, 13, 33 and 65 billion parameters, licensed for noncommercial research and granted case by case. On 3 March the full weights were posted as a BitTorrent link on 4chan and spread from there.

  12. OpenAI publishes Whisper under an MIT license

    OpenAI released Whisper on 21 September 2022, a speech-recognition system trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual audio collected from the web. Both the code and the pretrained weights were published under the permissive MIT license.

  13. Stability AI publishes the Stable Diffusion weights

    Stability AI, working with LMU Munich researchers, RunwayML, EleutherAI and LAION, published the full weights of Stable Diffusion on Hugging Face on 22 August 2022 under the CreativeML OpenRAIL-M license. The model ran on a single consumer graphics card.

  14. BigScience releases BLOOM with 176 billion parameters

    The BigScience collective, hundreds of volunteer researchers coordinated around Hugging Face and using France’s Jean Zay supercomputer, released BLOOM on 12 July 2022. The 176-billion-parameter model wrote 46 natural languages and 13 programming languages.