Episode Details

Woohoo, we're almost done with July (my favorite month) and the Open Source AI decided to go out with some fireworks 🎉

Hey everyone, Alex here, writing this without my own personal superintelligence (more: later) and this week has been VERY BUSY with many new open source releases.

Just 1 hour before the show we already had 4 breaking news releases, a tiny Qwen3-coder, Cohere and StepFun both dropped multimodal SOTAs and our friends from Krea dropped a combined model with BFL called Flux[Krea] 👏

This is on top of a very very busy week, with Runway adding conversation to their video model Alpha, Zucks' superintelligence vision and a new SOTA open video model Wan 2.2. So let's dive straight into this (as always, all show notes and links are in the end)

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Open Source LLMs & VLMs

Tons of new stuff here, I'll try to be brief but each one of these releases deserves a deeper dive for sure.

Alibaba is on 🔥 with 3 new Qwen models this week

Yes, this is very similar to last week, where they have also dropped 3 new SOTA models in a week, but, these are additional ones.

It seems that someone in Alibaba figured out that after splitting away from the hybrid models, they can now release each model separately and get a lot of attention per model!

Here's the timeline:

* Friday (just after our show): Qwen3-235B-Thinking-2507 drops (235B total, 22B active, HF)

* Tuesday: Qwen3-30B-Thinking-2507 (30B total, 3B active, HF)

* Today: Qwen3-Coder-Flash-2507 lands (30B total, 3B active for coding, HF)

Lets start with the SOTA reasoner, the 235B(A22B)-2507 is absolutely the best reasoner among the open source models.

We've put the model on our inference service (at crazy prices $.10/$.10) and it's performing absolutely incredible on reasoning tasks.

It also jumped to the top OSS model on Artificial Analysis scores, EQBench, Long Context and more evals. It a really really good reasoning model!

Smaller Qwens for local use

Just a week ago, we've asked Junyang on our show, about smaller models that folks can run on their devices, and he avoided by saying "we're focusing on the larger models" and this week, they delivered not 1 but 2 smaller versions of the bigger models (perfect for Speculative Decoding if you can host the larger ones that is)

The most interesting one is the Qwen3-Coder-flash, which came out today, with very very impressive stats - and the ability to run locally with almost 80 tok/s on a macbook!

So for the last two weeks, we now have 3 Qwens (Instruct, Thinking, Coder) and 2 sizes for each (all three have a 30B/A3B version now for local use) 👏

Z.ai GLM and StepFun Step3

As we've said previously, Chinese companies completely dominate the open source AI field right now, and this week as saw yet another crazy testament to how stark the difference is!

We've seen a rebranded Zhipu (Z.ai previously THUDM) release their new GLM 4.5 - which gives Qwen3-thinking a run for it's money. Not quite at that level, but definitely very close. I personally didn't love the release esthetics, showing a blended eval score, which nobody can replicate feels a bit off.

We also talked about how StepFun h