Qwen

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. While US labs argue about who ships next, Alibaba shipped. Its flagship Qwen-Max model went live in August, and the open-weight release of the base model followed two weeks later — meaning the weights are downloadable, runnable, and free to deploy under the published license. That combination put a frontier-class model from a Chinese lab into the hands of anyone on earth with a GPU or an API key, and it’s the sharpest challenge yet to the assumption that the AI lead belongs to America by default. I wrote about the same current from the other direction in the one prompt that changed everything — the moment cheap capability showed up for people who don’t write code. This post is the follow-through: how to actually test one of these models against your own work, without writing a line of code. ...