So Long, GPT-5. Hello, Qwen

The Rise of Qwen: China's Open-Weight Model Takes Center Stage

As I walked through the headquarters of Rokid, a startup developing smart glasses in Hangzhou, China, I was struck by the seamless integration of technology and innovation. Engineers chatted with me in Mandarin, and their words were swiftly translated into English, transcribed onto a tiny translucent screen just above my right eye using one of the company's new prototype devices. This high-tech spectacle uses 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. However, Qwen and other Chinese models are increasingly popular because they are both very good and very easy to tinker with.

The Open-Weight Advantage

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, a Chinese AI company, shook the world by releasing a cutting-edge large language model with much less compute than US rivals. 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's Capabilities

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.

The Rise of Chinese Open-Weight Models

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.

When OpenAI unveiled its latest model, GPT-5, in August it also underwhelmed. Some users complained of an oddly cold demeanor while others spotted surprising simple errors. OpenAI released a less powerful open model called gpt-oss the same month, but Qwen and other Chinese models remain more popular because more work is put into building and updating them, and because details of their engineering are often published widely.

The Openness of Chinese AI Companies

Hundreds of academic papers presented at NeurIPS, the premier AI conference, used Qwen. "A lot of scientists are using Qwen because it's the best open-weight model," says Andy Konwinski, cofounder of the Laude Institute, a nonprofit established to advocate for open US models.

The openness adopted by Chinese AI companies, which sees them routinely publishing papers detailing new engineering and training tricks, stands in stark contrast to the increasingly closed ethos of big US companies, which seem afraid of giving away their intellectual property, Kowinski says. A paper from the Qwen team, detailing a way to enhance the intelligence of models during training, was named as one of the best papers at NeurIPS this year.

The Impact of Qwen

Other big Chinese companies are using Qwen to prototype and build. A few days before visiting Rokid, I saw how BYD, China's leading EV maker, has integrated the model into a new dashboard assistant. US firms are adopting Qwen too. Airbnb, Perplexity, and Nvidia are all using Qwen. Even Meta, once the pioneer of open models, is now said to be using Qwen to help build a new model.

Kowinski says US AI companies have become too focused on gaining a marginal edge on narrow benchmarks measuring things like mathematical or coding skills at the expense of ensuring that their models have a big impact. "When benchmarks are not representative of real usage or problems being solved in the world, you end up in this tired, misaligned mode," he says.

The Future of AI

The rising prominence of Qwen and similar models does seem to suggest that a key measure for any AI model, beyond how clever it is, should be how widely it is used to build other stuff. By that benchmark, Qwen and other open Chinese models are ascendant.

As AI continues to evolve, it's clear that the future of the field will be shaped by the openness and collaboration of companies like Alibaba and Rokid. By sharing their knowledge and expertise, they are creating a new era of innovation and progress.

In the end, the success of Qwen and other Chinese open-weight models is a testament to the power of collaboration and the importance of openness in the development of AI. As we look to the future, it's clear that the next great breakthroughs will come from the intersection of technology and human ingenuity, and that the open-source community will play a vital role in shaping the course of AI research.

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/expired-tired-wired-gpt-5/