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
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