Qwen Surpasses GPT-5 in Popularity as Chinese Open-Weight Models Gain Ground

Summary

WIRED reports that Alibaba's Qwen large language model has rapidly risen to become the second-most-popular open model in the world according to OpenRouter, a platform that routes queries to different AI models. The article frames 2026 as a year where Qwen and other Chinese open-weight models will dominate, following the earlier disruption caused by DeepSeek's demonstration that cutting-edge models could be built with significantly less compute than US rivals. The rise of Qwen has coincided with