So Long, GPT-5. Hello, Qwen

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 ...