On a drizzly day And on a windy afternoon this summer, I visited the headquarters of Rokid, a smart glasses startup in Hangzhou, China. As I chatted with engineers, their words were quickly translated from Mandarin to English, then transcribed onto a small translucent screen just above my right eye using one of the company's new prototype devices.
Rokid's high-tech glasses use Qwen, a large open-weight language model developed by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.
Qwen – full name 通义千问 or Tōngyì Qiānwèn in Chinese – isn't the best AI model out there. OpenAI's GPT-5, Google's Gemini 3, and Anthropic's Claude often score higher on benchmarks designed to measure different dimensions of machine smarts. Qwen isn't the first truly advanced open-weight model either, namely Meta's Llama, which was released by the social media giant in 2023.
Still, Qwen and other Chinese models – from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Z.ai and MiniMax – are becoming 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 models in July this year. DeepSeek shook the world by releasing an advanced large language model with far less computing power than US rivals, but OpenRouter, a platform that routes queries to various AI models, says Qwen has quickly risen in popularity over the year, becoming the second most popular open model in the world.
Qwen can do most of the things you would want from an advanced AI model. For Rokid's users, this may include identifying products captured by a built-in camera, getting directions on a map, composing messages, searching the Internet, and so on. Because Qwen is easy to download and customize, Rokid hosts a version of the model tailored to its purposes. It is also possible to run a teenage version of Qwen on smartphones or other devices, in case the internet connection goes down.
Before I went 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 giants that live in large data centers.
The rise of Qwen and other Chinese open-weight models has coincided with stumbles for some famous American AI models in the past twelve 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.
