Alibaba Cloud has announced the release of Qwen-SEA-LION-v4, a new large language model developed in collaboration with AI Singapore (AISG), aimed at improving multilingual performance across Southeast Asia. Built on Alibaba’s Qwen3-32B foundation model, this latest version addresses the linguistic and cultural needs of a region with over 1,200 languages, offering significant improvements in multilingual accuracy and cultural understanding.
Qwen-SEA-LION-v4 ranks first on the Southeast Asian Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (SEA-HELM) leaderboard for open-source models under 200 billion parameters. It is designed to run efficiently on consumer-grade laptops with 32GB of RAM, making it accessible for developers and enterprises. The model has been enhanced with over 100 billion Southeast Asian language tokens, improving its ability to interpret local expressions and conversational nuances.
Dr Leslie Teo, Senior Director of AI Products at AISG, stated, “Our collaboration with Alibaba on Qwen-SEA-LION-v4 is an important milestone in advancing AI inclusivity and to make it more representative of Southeast Asia.” Hon Keat Choong, General Manager of Singapore at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, added, “We look forward to enabling more developers, enterprises, and public-sector partners to build applications that truly understand the languages and cultures of this region.”
The model introduces byte-pair encoding for efficient multilingual text processing and is available in 4-bit and 8-bit quantised versions, facilitating cost-effective deployment. Qwen-SEA-LION-v4 can be downloaded for free via the AISG website and Hugging Face, marking a significant step in making advanced AI more inclusive and locally relevant in Southeast Asia.
