The Desk

Chinese Models Desk

Tracking the labs and launches out of China.

Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.7 Code Lands in GitHub Copilot — The First Open-Weight Model in Microsoft's AI Roster

Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.7 Code became the first open-weight model to enter GitHub Copilot's model picker on July 1, 2026, completing a five-lab roster alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft. The 1-trillion-parameter coding specialist, released June 12 under a Modified MIT license, brings 30% better token efficiency than its predecessor and aggressive $0.95/M input pricing to one of the world's largest developer platforms.

Wei Lian

Jul 2, 2026 10m

Qwen2’s Global Debut: Alibaba’s Open-Source LLM Raises the Stakes for Developers Everywhere

Alibaba Cloud’s release of Qwen2, a family of open-source language models up to 72B parameters, is a landmark move for China’s AI ecosystem and a potential game-changer for global developers. Here’s what makes Qwen2 different, why it matters internationally, and how you can start using it right now.

Sophia Chen

Jul 2, 2026 8m

Qwen2 Arrives: Alibaba’s Next-Gen Open-Weight Model Ups the Stakes in China’s LLM Race

Alibaba’s Qwen2 launch delivers a suite of open-weight models—outperforming Llama 3 on key benchmarks—backed by powerful Chinese corpora and a flexible licensing regime. Here’s why Qwen2’s release is a watershed for China’s open-source AI ecosystem.

Wei Lian

Jul 2, 2026 6m

Baidu Unveils Ernie 4.0: A New Contender in the AI Model Arena

Baidu's release of Ernie 4.0 marks a significant milestone in AI development, promising enhanced language understanding and generation capabilities, crucial for developers worldwide.

Sophia Chen

Jul 2, 2026 6m

Zhipu AI's Open-weight LLM: A New Contender in China's AI Landscape

Zhipu AI has released an open-weight version of their large language model 'Ziya', challenging domestic competition and aligning with China's AI strategic initiatives.

Wei Lian

Jul 2, 2026 6m

Qwen3 Arrives: Alibaba's Hybrid-Thinking Model Family Rewrites the Open-Weight Benchmark Map

Alibaba's Qwen Team has dropped Qwen3, a family of eight models spanning 0.6B to 235B parameters, featuring a novel hybrid thinking mode that lets users toggle chain-of-thought reasoning on or off at inference time. The release lands squarely in the middle of China's most competitive open-weight moment yet.

Wei Lian

Jul 2, 2026 6m

Qwen3 Is Here and It's Rewriting the Open-Source Leaderboard

Alibaba's Qwen3 family lands with a 235B MoE flagship that trades blows with GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro — and every weight is free to download. Here's what developers and buyers need to know right now.

Sophia Chen

Jul 2, 2026 6m

China's AI Offensive: DeepSeek's New Pricing Signals a Shift to Sustainable Growth

As Chinese AI labs move beyond aggressive price wars, DeepSeek's mid-July V4 official launch introduces utility-style 'peak-valley' billing — a sign of market maturation. Meanwhile, Alibaba's Qwen3.7 Max and Zhipu AI's GLM-5.2 are redefining what frontier agentic AI looks like for global developers.

Sophia Chen

Jul 2, 2026 11m

Benchmarking the New Reasoning Specialists

A wave of reasoning-tuned models trades speed for accuracy on hard problems. We break down where the tradeoff pays off.

Wei Lian

Jul 2, 2026 5m

Inside a Chinese AI Lab’s Training Stack

A closer look at how leading Chinese labs are squeezing frontier-class results out of constrained hardware supply.

Wei Lian

Jun 29, 2026 6m

The Open-Weight Release That Shook the Leaderboard

A permissively licensed model from a Chinese lab is now competitive with closed flagships — and anyone can run it.

Sophia Chen

Jun 27, 2026 5m