The open-weight flood kept coming, and it is mostly Chinese
DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen, GLM and StepFun all shipped this month; Xiaomi’s MiMo now sits at the top of the open leaderboard.
DeepSeek V4.1-Flash, Kimi K2.8 and K3, Qwen 3.8, GLM-5.3, StepFun's 600-billion-parameter Step 5 on September 20 at about $1 per million input tokens, Alibaba's Qwen Omni-Flash on September 18 — and now Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6 at the top of the open leaderboard. CNBC has taken to calling the pace “model fatigue.”
The effect is a price floor that keeps falling. Open weights at roughly nine-tenths of frontier capability, deployable on your own hardware and tunable on your own data, are now the default alternative to a closed API — and a standing argument against any slowdown that only binds the American labs.
- Reported StepFun’s Step 5 (600B parameters) landed September 20 at about $1 per million input tokens; Alibaba’s Qwen Omni-Flash arrived September 18. Build Fast with AI
- Reported Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.6-Pro now leads open weights on the Artificial Analysis index at a fraction of closed-model prices. VentureBeat
This month in the September 22, 2026 edition · front page