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On a drizzly and windswept afternoon this summer, I visited the headquarters of Rokid, a startup developing smart glasses in Hangzhou, China. As I chatted with engineers, their words were swiftly translated from Mandarin to English, and then transcribed onto a tiny translucent screen just above my right eye using one of the company’s new prototype devices.
Rokid’s high-tech spectacles use Qwen, an open-weight large language model developed by the Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba.
Qwen—full name 通义千问 or Tōngyì Qiānwèn in Chinese—is not the best AI model around. OpenAI’s GPT-5, Google’s Gemini 3, and Anthropic’s Claude often score higher on benchmarks designed to gauge different dimensions of machine cleverness. Nor is Qwen the first truly cutting-edge open-weight model, that being Meta’s Llama, which was released by the social media giant in 2023.
Yet Qwen, and other Chinese models—from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Z.ai, and MiniMax—are increasingly popular because they are both very good and very easy to tinker with. According to HuggingFace, a company that provides access to AI models and code, downloads of open Chinese models on its platform surpassed downloads for US ones in July of this year. DeepSeek shook the world by releasing a cutting-edge large language model with much less compute than US rivals, but OpenRouter, a platform that routes queries to different AI models, says Qwen has rapidly risen in popularity through the year to become the second-most-popular open model in the world.
Qwen can do most things you’d want from an advanced AI model. For Rokid’s users, this might include identifying products snapped by a built-in camera, getting directions from a map, drafting messages, searching the web, and so on. Since Qwen can easily be downloaded and modified, Rokid hosts a version of the model, fine-tuned to suit its purposes. It is also possible to run a teensy version of Qwen on smartphones or other devices just in case the internet connection goes down.
Before going to China I installed a small version of Qwen on my MacBook Air and used it to practice some basic Mandarin. For many purposes, modestly sized open source models like Qwen are just as good as the behemoths that live inside big data centers.
The rise of Qwen and other Chinese open-weight models has coincided with stumbles for some famous American AI models in the last 12 months. When Meta unveiled Llama 4 in April 2025, the model’s performance was a disappointment, failing to reach the heights of popular benchmarks like LM Arena. The slip left many developers looking for other open models to play with.
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