Singapore picks Alibaba’s Qwen to drive regional language model in big win for China tech
In a boost for China’s AI ambitions, AI Singapore has chosen Alibaba’s Qwen to train its new language model
AI Singapore (AISG) – a national programme by the city state of Singapore to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence – has chosen to base its latest large language model on Alibaba’s Qwen, in a significant win for the Chinese technology giant as it promotes its AI services in Southeast Asia.
AI Singapore, designed to enhance the city state’s national AI capabilities, had released a new model, Qwen-SEA-LION-v4, based on Alibaba’s Qwen3-32B foundation model to better address the linguistic and cultural demands of the region, Alibaba Cloud said in a statement. Alibaba Group Holding owns the South China Morning Post.
An early version of the SEA-LION models was based on Llama, the open-source large language model developed by US tech giant Meta.
AISG in August also released a multimodal model for Southeast Asia based on Gemma, an open-source model developed by Google DeepMind.
The roll-out of models such as DeepSeek as well as Qwen has significantly boosted China’s competitiveness in the arena.
The cooperation between Alibaba Cloud and AISG underscores how Alibaba’s open-source strategy has helped the company’s AI model family maintain its appeal among global AI developers.