Thomson Reuters builds in-house AI model on Alibaba's Qwen for $40M
schwarzjn_ · x · 2026-08-28
Thomson Reuters spent two years and approximately $40 million building an in-house AI model, with the final training run costing just $450,000. The project started with Alibaba's open-source Qwen model and was fine-tuned on proprietary legal and news data from Westlaw and Reuters. The CTO compared relying on external AI APIs to being a permanent tenant, while owning the model equates to owning the building. Enterprise customers are broadly cutting spending on OpenAI and Anthropic in favor of cheaper alternatives.
Related event: Thomson Reuters Spent $40M Building Its Own AI Model on Qwen(2 posts)→
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