This is a great distinction that I don’t think is getting talked about enough. “Open source” is probably the wrong term to use. Open “weights”, sure.
If your only concern is how good is it at coding, then I don’t have an issue with using the Chinese models. Especially if you want to run it locally, they are kind of the only choice.
For any other use than coding, it’s going to have to be a hard pass from me.
Well I don't see how it even could be open source, since the source is distilling closed weights models, lol.
Also, who cares about having the source? Are you going to tweak it + spend a billion dollars training to get slightly different weights? Who would do that?