Open-weight families — Qwen, DeepSeek, MiniMax-class (high level)

The market moves monthly. Exact model names will change before this page is old. What you need is orientation:

• Qwen (Alibaba family) — often strong multilingual options; check current licence on the official site.
• DeepSeek — often discussed for reasoning and coding; same rule: read the licence today.
• MiniMax-class — vendor “mini” stacks; treat as a category, not a single product you must use.

Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, and similar tools are runners: they load weights and talk to your IDE or terminal. You still choose which weights and whether IT allows them.

Do this — one bookmark (15 minutes)

1. Pick one path you might try later (ollama.ai, lmstudio.ai, or your package manager docs).
2. Open the official getting-started or install page.
3. Bookmark it.
4. In one sentence, write what the licence allows you to do (personal? commercial? attribution?).
5. If you cannot find a licence link, stop — that is a red flag.

Do not download random weight files from forums this week. This course wants habits, not a GPU lab on day one.

Do this — label three categories (5 minutes)

Category	Example families (illustrative)	Your note (research / skip / ask IT)
Multilingual open models	Qwen, others
Reasoning / code oriented	DeepSeek, others
Vendor “mini” stacks	MiniMax-class, others

Why we stay non-prescriptive

Hardware, drivers, and OS differ. Your work machine may block installs. A Chromebook may not support local inference. The professional skill is: find the doc, read the licence, ask IT — not memorise a blog post from last month.

Optional — explore two browser chats

Want to compare families hands-on? See the optional deep dive: Open-weight exploration.

Minimum for this lesson: spend 15 minutes in one browser chat or document why you skipped (device policy, no account, etc.). Use only non-sensitive prompts.

Check

• You have one bookmark to a vendor or org you recognise.
• You can say one difference between “open-weight” and “open source app” in plain language.
• You completed the browser task above or documented your skip reason.

What's next

Next up: Hardware, time, and proportionality