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 of many firm’s new prototype gadgets.
Rokid’s high-tech spectacles use Qwen, an open-weight giant language mannequin developed by the Chinese language ecommerce large Alibaba.
Qwen—full title 通义千问 or Tōngyì Qiānwèn in Chinese language—just isn’t one of the best AI mannequin round. OpenAI’s GPT-5, Google’s Gemini 3, and Anthropic’s Claude usually rating greater on benchmarks designed to gauge completely different dimensions of machine cleverness. Neither is Qwen the primary 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 fashionable as a result of they’re each superb and really simple 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 completely different AI fashions, says Qwen has quickly risen in recognition by way of the 12 months to change into the second-most-popular open mannequin on this planet.
Qwen can do most belongings you’d need from a sophisticated AI mannequin. For Rokid’s customers, this would possibly embrace figuring out merchandise snapped by a built-in digital camera, getting instructions from a map, drafting messages, looking out the net, and so forth. Since Qwen can simply be downloaded and modified, Rokid hosts a model of the mannequin, fine-tuned to swimsuit its functions. It is usually attainable to run a teensy model of Qwen on smartphones or different gadgets 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 because the behemoths that dwell inside massive knowledge facilities.
The rise of Qwen and different Chinese language open-weight fashions has coincided with stumbles for some well-known American AI fashions within the final 12 months. When Meta unveiled Llama 4 in April 2025, the mannequin’s efficiency was a disappointment, failing to achieve the heights of fashionable benchmarks like LM Enviornment. The slip left many builders searching for different open fashions to play with.
