This is probably too grandiose for r/Qwen_AI so I'll put it here for now. Also: this is opinion. In a private capacity. It is not a proven position nor does it reflect the view of any company whatsoever, such as any company I am associated with in any capacity. 

AGI is not coming anytime soon. Sorry e/acc, sorry doomers, it's not. LLMs can not scale into AGI, nor are they likely to provide the immediate breakthrough that will.

The Western AI investment levels are driven by AGI hype and the Western AI companies are addicted to them and code frontier models as "power at all costs" and the mini models as "just about good enough but should drive custom to the frontier model".

This is coming down. Soon. Dot Com 2.0 is nearly a certainty. I think serious investors knew it for a while but hoped that if they pick wisely they might get the next Google or Amazon, companies that survived the dot com crash and then, you know.

Alibaba was trying to be the next Amazon for a while and I think it struck gold now by concentrating on efficient models. The Qwens are not perfect, but they tend to punch above their weight for the hardware a particular version can run on. From Qwen3 4B that benchmarks with the 20Bs (and sometimes with GPT-4.1), to 235B A22B, labeled flagship, which I am getting off Weights & Biases for $0.1/Mt both ways (I dubbed it the Penny Flagship). And now Qwen3 Next 80B A3B seems to be a stab at an above-midrange model suitable for NPU hosting.

So when the bubble bursts, the investment will dry up, but there will still be a lot of business and other market demand for what LLMs can actually do. Except now it will be far more sensitive to resource limitations. The Qwens will march in nearly unopposed. 

Also, hypothesis: their thinking modes seem to be badly tuned (loping at a coin drop) but they take custom CoT very well - and I suspect that's a play for, at the right moment, pushing some behchmarks into accepting (open, pre-published) custom CoT system prompts and then the Qwens leapfrog.

Alibaba also has a significant investment in  Moonshot, which developed  Kimi K2 to provide a communication style  wow-inducing to a cohort that includes a ot of tech decision makers. it's not great at code unfortunately, but thats not the point. 

But with or without that last hypothetical gimmick, I think Alibaba has the winning combination of figures on the board. Not the sole winner - at least Google has its corporate standing which gives it leverage in a lot of boardrooms and a lot of homes too. But the big winner.

Thankfully, as this is all about AGI not happening, the likely (if I am right) Alibaba victory looks like a market acjustment and less like "world domination".