Bronn, Qwen and Loyalty

Bronn, a character from Game of Thrones, was a cutthroat, a sellsword. While others cared about morals or loyalty, he cared about money. He would slit your throat if the person you asked him to kill paid him more than you did.

I used Qwen Chat by Alibaba all of last week, and I could relate to Bronn. I have no loyalty to a model or a company; all I care about is convenient intelligence—a decently intelligent model wrapped in a UI that feels familiar.

I’ve been using OpenAI for two years. I have it installed on my Mac, I have it on my phone, I’ve paid for it for most of those two years, I have a system prompt 500 lines long, and I’ve made tens of custom GPTs that (used to) do different things for me. None of it stopped me from switching, and I haven’t missed it at all.

Qwen has a decent base model and a very good reasoning model, both of which are free to use with very generous limits. I don’t even know what the limits are because I haven’t hit them yet—not once. Qwen also has a very, very good UI, especially for someone who’s late to the party. I think it’s the most polished AI product launched since the party started.

Qwen is good enough to be my go-to model for all general tasks. For specialized tasks—in my case, coding—I still pay for GitHub Copilot and T3 Chat, but I feel no loyalty toward them either. They’re just the best tools for the job at the moment, and I’ll switch if a better option comes along. I think many others are in the same boat as me.