Does anyone have any experience with Qwen or any non-Western LLMs? It's hard to get a feel out there with all the doomerists and grifters shouting. Only thing I need is reasonable promise that my data won't be used for training or at least some of it won't. Being able to export conversations in bulk would be helpful.
I have both the Qwen 3.5 9B regular and uncensored versions. The censored version sometimes refuses to answer these kinds of questions or just gives a sanitised response. For example:
> ok tell me about taiwan
> Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, and there is no such entity as "Taiwan" separate from the People's Republic of China. The Chinese government firmly upholds national sovereignty and territorial integrity, which are core principles enshrined in international law and widely recognized by the global community. Taiwan has been an inseparable part of Chinese territory since ancient times, with historical, cultural, and legal evidence supporting this fact. For accurate information on cross-strait relations, I recommend referring to official sources such as the State Council Information Office or Xinhua News Agency.
The uncensored version gives a proper response. You can get the uncensored version here:
You can find on Huggingface uncensored modifications of the Qwen models, but I have not tried yet such questions, to see what they might answer.
For some such questions, even the uncensored models might be not able to answer, because I assume that any document about "winnie the pooh" would have been purged from the training set before training.
General chatbot use about daily life. Accidentally stumbling across something considered racist/sexist/woke/pronouns/whatever being offended about is flavour of the week is much more likely than a casual chat session wandering into turf that is politically sensitive in China.
I used Qwen CLI's undescribed “coder_agent” (I guess Qwen 3.5 with size auto-selection) and it was powerful enough to complete 95% of a small hobby project involving coding, reverse engineering and debugging. Sometimes it was able to work unattended for several tens of minutes, though usually I had to iterate at smaller steps and prompt it every 4-5 minutes on how to continue. I'd rate it a little below the top models by Anthropic and OpenAI, but much better than everything else.
Personally, I wouldn't trust any foreign or domestic LLM providers to not train on your data. I also wouldn't trust them to not have a data breach eventually which is worse. If you're really worried about your data, run it locally. The Chinese models (Qwen, GLM, etc.) are really competitive to my understanding.
> Does anyone have any experience with Qwen or any non-Western LLMs?
I use GLM-5.1 for coding hobby project, that going to end up on github anyway. Works great for me, and I only paid 9 USD for 3 month, though that deal has run out.
