Alibaba's Qwen is foundation for more and more Japanese AI models

Company's latest version beats Chinese peer DeepSeek in Nikkei ranking

20250505N Qwen

Qwen's open models demonstrate particularly high performance compared with competitors, making them popular with startups. © Reuters

Nikkei staff writers

TOKYO -- Qwen, a family of AI large language models developed by China's Alibaba Cloud, is increasing its presence in Japan as local startups like Abeja use the open-source service to develop their own models, some of which now rank among the world's best.

Abeja, which develops systems that analyze physical spaces, announced on April 17 its new QwQ-32B Reasoning Model, which demonstrated a high ability to link decisions together and output complex answers. The basis for the development of this model was Alibaba's Qwen model.

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