Alibaba Cloud Collaborates With AI Singapore to Launch Lightweight LLM Tailored for Southeast Asia

AI Singapore has launched a new large language model (LLM), Qwen-SEA-LION-v4, with support from Alibaba Cloud, to better support the linguistic, cultural and commercial needs of Southeast Asia. The model is designed to run even on a consumer laptop with 32GB of RAM, while delivering stronger multilingual accuracy and cultural contextual understanding.

The foundation model, Alibaba’s Qwen3-32B, was trained on over 100 billion words and phrases from Southeast Asian languages, sourced from a dataset covering 119 languages and dialects. This enables the system to better interpret local expressions, conversational nuances, and cultural references often overlooked by global AI models.

Additionally, the Qwen team incorporated more translation and cross-lingual training tasks during post-training, improving the model’s ability to handle regional multilingual scenarios such as code-switching, informal conversations, and mixed English-local language usage.

Dr. Leslie Teo, Senior Director of AI Products at AI Singapore, stated, “Our partnership with Alibaba on Qwen-SEA-LION-v4 marks a significant step toward AI inclusivity, ensuring the technology better represents Southeast Asia. This collaboration aligns with our shared goal of accelerating AI innovation in the region, providing developers, businesses, and public institutions with open, affordable, and locally relevant AI solutions that truly understand the region’s languages and cultures.”

Qwen-SEA-LION-v4 is part of the SEA-LION (Southeast Asian Languages in One Network) family of LLMs developed by AI Singapore to capture the region’s linguistic and cultural diversity.

Under the partnership, Alibaba contributed the Qwen3-32B foundation model and technical expertise for advanced post-training, while AI Singapore provided region-specific open-source data, optimization, and evaluation for Southeast Asian language tasks.

To enhance multilingual accuracy, Qwen-SEA-LION-v4 employs byte-pair encoding, breaking text into smaller, more manageable segments for efficient processing. The model’s training now includes additional datasets in Burmese, Filipino, Indonesian, Malay, Tamil, Thai, and Vietnamese, further improving cultural fluency and contextual comprehension.

With a native 32k-token context length, the model can manage complex tasks such as document-level reasoning and summarization. Available in 4-bit and 8-bit quantized versions, it offers cost-effective deployment for developers and enterprises on local infrastructure without significant performance compromises.

Hon Keat Choong, General Manager of Singapore at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, remarked, “By integrating our model’s multilingual and reasoning capabilities with AI Singapore’s regional expertise, Qwen-SEA-LION-v4 exemplifies how open collaboration can make advanced AI more inclusive and locally applicable. We aim to empower developers, businesses, and public-sector partners to build applications that genuinely understand the region’s languages and cultures.”

Currently, Qwen-SEA-LION-v4 ranks as the top open-source language model under 200 billion parameters for Southeast Asian languages. It is available for free download on AI Singapore’s website and Hugging Face.