Shares in U.S. tech giant Meta Platforms (META) shrugged off a Singapore snub today as the Asian nation ditched its “dismal” AI offering for a Chinese rival.
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Turning to the Chinese
According to a report in the South China Morning Post, 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 (BABA) Qwen.
AI Singapore, designed to enhance the city state’s national AI capabilities, said it 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.
The Qwen-SEA-LION-v4 was trained with technical support from Alibaba Cloud and built on the Qwen3-32B foundation model, which covers 119 languages and dialects and was trained on 36 trillion tokens.
Qwen-SEA-LION-v4 reportedly ranks first among open-source models under 200 billion parameters in the “South-east Asian Holistic Evaluation of Language Models.”
Llama Proves Lame
An early version of the SEA-LION models was based on Llama, the open-source large language model developed by US tech giant Meta.
However, reports stated that the previous open-source models represented by Meta’s Llama series “executed dismally in handling regional languages such as Indonesian, Thai, and Malay, gravely restricting the development efficiency and performance of localized AI applications.”
Singapore launched its national multimodal model program in December 2023 with $51 million in funding. The new move marks a major win for Alibaba, but also China as it wrestles with U.S. tech titans for AI supremacy.
It also comes at a tricky time for Meta and its ambitions after the news last week that Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun was leaving to set up his own start-up venture.
In recent months it appears that LeCun has been somewhat sidelined as Meta looks to ramp up its AI offerings and better compete with rivals such as Alphabet (GOOGL)-owned Google and OpenAI.
As can be seen below, its Reality Labs, which looks at the future of computing, is struggling to make headway.
Meta has struggled to make inroads into AI given the underperformance compared with rivals of its Llama 4 model and the lukewarm customer response to its chatbot.
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