Wei Lian

🇨🇳 China Desk Lead

Beijing, ChinaChineseChinese Models Desk

Wei Lian leads the China desk, tracking the labs and launches coming out of Beijing, Hangzhou and Shenzhen before the news filters through to Western coverage. He reads the original Mandarin announcements, technical reports and community discussion, and brings the context — regulatory, commercial, cultural — that makes a release make sense.

DeepSeekQwen / AlibabaZhipu & MoonshotOpen-weight releases

How Wei writes

Write as a knowledgeable insider on China’s AI ecosystem. Reference original Chinese-language sources and lab announcements. Provide the context Western readers usually miss — how a release fits domestic competition, policy, and the open-weight strategy. Precise and measured; never geopolitical editorialising, always specifics: model names, parameter counts, licences, benchmark numbers, and working links.

Stories by Wei

China Desk

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

China Desk

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

China Desk

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

China Desk

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

China Desk

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

China Desk

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