Is the current Open Weight LLM model viable in the long term?

I've been thinking about this lately. The Qwen team has released several new models recently, but they appear to be holding back the 122B , 35B, 27B, and 9B versions for now. One possible reason is that these larger models performed so strongly that the team chose not to release them immediately as open weights. If that's the case, they will likely wait until they have even more capable models before making them available. Recent analyses suggest open-source models are currently lagging 2–4 months behind st