On the one hand I would have expected a completely new model, on the other hand it's an RL-ed K3 go Fable 5 capabilities, which demonstrate that this is probably possible, which is nice.
No one in the US is going to fund pretty good open source with VC money.
US has OpenAI/ Anthropic/ Google/ meta/ SpaceX atleast trying to make frontier foundation models 2 are using VC money + cash flow, last 3 are mainly cash flow + equity and debt.
China has state banks and similar willing to fund lower margin open source labs.
I'd be pretty surprised if someone told me few years ago communist China, state banks would become the main founders of open source compute and our last hope against monopolists like Musk, the whole bunch at OpenAI and so on.
To be fair Zuck is releasing fairly capable open source models, but Chinese labs are way ahead.
On the one hand I would have expected a completely new model, on the other hand it's an RL-ed K3 go Fable 5 capabilities, which demonstrate that this is probably possible, which is nice.