Hey Lobsters, welcome to this 4th edition of ShanghAI.

The goal of this weekly newsletter is to share my latest discoveries on Chinese AI models, and how I use their powerful abilities as well as their prices to scale businesses.

Each week, I will share you free tools examples that you can try to build by yourself and see if they can help your business grow.

Use these unknown models without living in China or speaking Chinese can be a tough task. Good news ? I am, and I can help you to reach them.

All of this, readable within 2 minutes, because I know you guys are busy.

Last week, we hacked the new Trae pricing to build apps for $3. Today, we are giving your business "Eyes and Ears."

Alibaba just dropped Qwen3.5-Omni, and it’s the first real open-weight competitor to GPT-4o with a massive context window.

Qwen is the industrial AI backbone of Alibaba Group. While Silicon Valley builds chatbots for conversation, Alibaba built Qwen to manage the world's largest e-commerce and logistics ecosystem.

It currently powers over 1 million enterprise customers, handling billions of transactions with rock-bottom operational costs.

Released on March 30, 2026, Qwen3.5-Omni is a native multimodal model. Unlike older AIs that "stitch" different parts together, this one has a single "Thinker-Talker" brain. It processes text, images, audio, and video simultaneously in one go.

The breakthrough is the 256K context window. In plain English: it can "watch" 10 hours of continuous audio or 400 seconds of high-quality video without forgetting the beginning.

Because it uses a "Hybrid-Attention" architecture, it’s incredibly fast and costs roughly $0.20 per million tokens. You’re getting Gemini-level vision and hearing for a 90% discount compared to Western APIs.

You can leverage Qwen3.5-Omni right now to automate high-level quality control that usually requires a full-time human manager.

Imagine a specialized "Instant Auditor" service for retail chains or sales departments where clients simply upload a 2-hour Zoom training session or a 30-minute video walkthrough of a physical store.

Instead of a manager spending half a day reviewing the footage, Qwen "watches" the entire stream in seconds, pinpointing exactly when a sales rep missed a crucial closing cue or identifying a messy display shelf in a retail aisle.

The real business shift is in the "right to fail" and refine: because the cost is so low, you can run and iterate your analysis 70 to 100 times for the price of a single high-end American API call.

This massive cost gap allows you to offer "Unlimited Video Auditing" to your clients, selling a premium oversight service that was previously too expensive to exist, all while maintaining a 95% profit margin.

The only thing stopping most people from leveraging Qwen is the massive "China Wall" - the annoying Chinese phone number requirements, VPN lags, and broken setups that waste hours of your time.

I’ve spent the last days testing a specific workaround that lets you bypass the entire verification process and get the English interface running on your phone or laptop in under five minutes.

I’m sharing the "No-Phone" setup guide and my personal list of pre-configured automation shortcuts in next week’s edition.