Article by Sam Eifling: “So far, the AI boom has been dominated by U.S. companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta. In recent months, though, a new name has been popping up on benchmarking lists: Alibaba’s Qwen. Over the past few months, variants of Qwen have been topping the leaderboards of sites that measure an AI model’s performance.
“Qwen 72B is the king, and Chinese models are dominating,” Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue wrote in June, after a Qwen-based model first rose to the top of his company’s Open LLM leaderboard.
It’s a surprising turnaround for the Chinese AI industry, which many thought was doomed by semiconductor restrictions and limitations on computing power. Qwen’s success is showing that China can compete with the world’s best AI models — raising serious questions about how long U.S. companies will continue to dominate the field. And by focusing on capabilities like language support, Qwen is breaking new ground on what an AI model can do — and who it can be built for.
Those capabilities have come as a surprise to many developers, even those working on Qwen itself. AI developer David Ng used Qwen to build the model that topped the Open LLM leaderboard. He’s built models using Meta and Google’s technology also but says Alibaba’s gave him the best results. “For some reason, it works best on the Chinese models,” he told Rest of World. “I don’t know why.”..(More)”