"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."
Rokid's smart glasses display real-time translated transcriptions above the eye using a prototype powered by Qwen. Qwen (通义千问) is an open-weight large language model developed by Alibaba that is not the top performer on benchmarks compared with GPT-5, Gemini 3, and Claude. Chinese open models such as Qwen, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Z.ai, and MiniMax are growing in popularity because they are strong and easy to modify. HuggingFace reports downloads of open Chinese models surpassed US ones in July. OpenRouter notes Qwen's rapid rise to become the world's second-most-popular open model. Rokid hosts and fine-tunes Qwen and can run a tiny version locally.
Read at WIRED
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