The other way around. They started with Alibaba’s Qwen, then fine tuned it to match the thinking process behind 1000 hand picked queries on Google’s Gemini 2.0.

That $50 proce tag is kind of silly, but it’s like picking an old car and copying the mpg, seats, and paint job from a new car. It’s still an old car underneath, only it looks and behaves like a new one in some aspects.

I think it’s interesting that old models could be “upgraded” for such a low price. It points to something many have been suspecting for some time: LLMs are actually “too large”, they don’t need all that size to show some of the more interesting behaviors.