This isn’t an open-weights release, but it’s free for now. That distinction got lost last time, so I’m putting it first. Ant Group’s model team just shipped Ling-3.0-flash. What’s free is the API, and only until August 3. 124B total parameters. 5.1B active per token. 256K context. The generation before it, Ling-2.6-flash, went out under MIT. You could download that one and run it on your own hardware. This one you cannot. There is no checkpoint. So what’s actually on offer is a fixed window of free inference on somebody else’s endpoint, followed by a price. I work on the team, which is exactly why I’d rather hear the room on this than tell you it’s good. Because from outside, those two moves look nothing alike. Open weights buy permanence — the thing keeps working after the company loses interest in it. A free API window buys a trial and a switching cost. A lot of labs are picking the second one now. It’s sitting on OpenRouter next to everything else, so the comparison is one dropdown away for anyone who wants to run it. What does a free window with a date on it actually earn a lab, when the thing developers keep saying they want is weights they get to keep? submitted by /u/Loose_Bank1709
Originally posted by u/Loose_Bank1709 on r/ArtificialInteligence