On a drizzly and windswept afternoon this summer season, I visited the headquarters of Rokid, a startup growing smart glasses in Hangzhou, China. As I chatted with engineers, their phrases had been swiftly translated from Mandarin to English, after which transcribed onto a tiny translucent display screen simply above my proper eye utilizing one in all the firm’s new prototype units.
Rokid’s high-tech spectacles use Qwen, an open-weight giant language mannequin developed by the Chinese language ecommerce large Alibaba.
Qwen—full identify 通义千问 or Tōngyì Qiānwèn in Chinese language—is not the finest AI mannequin round. OpenAI’s GPT-5, Google’s Gemini 3, and Anthropic’s Claude typically rating greater on benchmarks designed to gauge totally different dimensions of machine cleverness. Nor is Qwen the first actually cutting-edge open-weight mannequin, that being Meta’s Llama, which was launched by the social media large in 2023.
But Qwen, and different Chinese language fashions—from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Z.ai, and MiniMax—are more and more in style as a result of they are each excellent and really straightforward to tinker with. According to HuggingFace, an organization that gives entry to AI fashions and code, downloads of open Chinese language fashions on its platform surpassed downloads for US ones in July of this 12 months. DeepSeek shook the world by releasing a cutting-edge giant language mannequin with a lot much less compute than US rivals, however OpenRouter, a platform that routes queries to totally different AI fashions, says Qwen has quickly risen in reputation by the 12 months to turn into the second-most-popular open mannequin in the world.
Qwen can do most belongings you’d need from a complicated AI mannequin. For Rokid’s customers, this would possibly embody figuring out merchandise snapped by a built-in digicam, getting instructions from a map, drafting messages, looking the internet, and so on. Since Qwen can simply be downloaded and modified, Rokid hosts a model of the mannequin, fine-tuned to go well with its functions. It is additionally doable to run a teensy model of Qwen on smartphones or different units simply in case the web connection goes down.
Earlier than going to China I put in a small model of Qwen on my MacBook Air and used it to observe some primary Mandarin. For a lot of functions, modestly sized open supply fashions like Qwen are simply pretty much as good as the behemoths that stay inside huge knowledge facilities.
The rise of Qwen and different Chinese language open-weight fashions has coincided with stumbles for some well-known American AI fashions in the final 12 months. When Meta unveiled Llama 4 in April 2025, the mannequin’s efficiency was a disappointment, failing to attain the heights of in style benchmarks like LM Enviornment. The slip left many builders searching for different open fashions to play with.
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