Organisation
Alibaba / Qwen
The Qwen family of open-weight and frontier models, developed by the company's cloud division.
Alibaba is the Chinese technology and e-commerce group whose Qwen family, developed by its cloud division, has become one of the most widely used lines of open-weight AI models. Beginning with the first Qwen releases in 2023, the company has published a broad range of models — spanning language, coding, vision and reasoning — many under permissive licences, and credits them with hundreds of millions of downloads and a large ecosystem of derivative fine-tunes. That open strategy has made Chinese labs, Alibaba among them, a significant source of the freely available models the wider field depends on. By 2026 it was releasing frontier-scale systems on a roughly quarterly cadence, including trillion-parameter models such as Qwen3-Max, while — like several rivals — keeping its very largest models closed and API-only even as it open-sourced smaller ones.
- Category
- Chinese AI labs
- Founded
- 1999
- HQ
- Hangzhou, CN
- Key people
- Eddie Wu
Appears alongside
Featured in threads
Tracks
- Models & capabilities 16
- Open weights & ecosystem 13
- Benchmarks & progress 4
- Government & policy 1
- Culture & impact 1
- Compute & infrastructure 1
- Labs & people 1
Alibaba unveils Qwen3.8-Max, its largest model, ahead of open-weight release
2.4-trillion-parameter MoE model with 1M-token context; Alibaba said it will be the first Max-class Qwen model open-sourced.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities
China's AI companion law takes effect, forcing Doubao and Qwen to shut agent features
Rather than add the anti-addiction and instant-exit features the rules required, ByteDance and Alibaba simply switched off their personalised AI-agent tools instead.
Government & policy · Culture & impact
Zhipu (Z.ai) releases GLM-5, trained entirely on Huawei Ascend chips
Released under the MIT licence, the 744-billion-parameter model scored 77.8% on SWE-bench Verified, days ahead of new Alibaba and ByteDance model launches.
Models & capabilities · Open weights & ecosystem · Compute & infrastructure
Alibaba unveils Qwen3-Max, its first trillion-parameter model
Unlike most of Alibaba's Qwen line, the model is closed-weight and API-only, released in separate instruct and thinking modes and scoring 69.6 on SWE-bench.
Models & capabilities · Benchmarks & progress
Alibaba releases Qwen3-Next, Qwen3-VL and Qwen3-Omni
Three architecture updates in one month: a sparse hybrid-attention base model, an updated vision-language line, and an Apache-licensed model handling text, image, audio and video.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities
Alibaba releases Qwen3-Coder
The mixture-of-experts model activates 35B of its 480B parameters per token and shipped under an Apache 2.0 licence with a command-line coding agent tool.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities
Alibaba releases Qwen3 model family
Open-weight family (dense and MoE, up to 235B-A22B) trained on 36 trillion tokens across 119 languages, Apache 2.0.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities
Alibaba releases Qwen2.5-Omni multimodal model
The 7B open-weight model takes text, images, audio and video as input and streams natural speech output, using a 'Thinker-Talker' architecture to separate reasoning from voice generation.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities
ETH Zurich's 'Proof or Bluff?' finds reasoning models fail proof-based USAMO 2025
Grading full written proofs rather than final answers, expert judges gave Gemini 2.5 Pro 24% and every other tested model under 5%, out of a possible 100%.
Benchmarks & progress
Alibaba releases QwQ-32B (full release)
Alibaba's Qwen team said reinforcement learning let a 32-billion-parameter model reach performance comparable to DeepSeek-R1's 671-billion-parameter model, under an Apache 2.0 licence.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities · Benchmarks & progress
01.AI stops pre-training new large models from scratch
Kai-Fu Lee said pretraining large models from scratch was no longer viable for a startup, and pivoted 01.AI toward fine-tuning DeepSeek and Qwen for enterprise clients.
Labs & people
Alibaba releases Qwen2.5-Max
Unlike most of Alibaba's Qwen line, Max was released as a proprietary API-only model, pretrained on over 20 trillion tokens, which Alibaba said beat DeepSeek-V3 on several benchmarks.
Models & capabilities · Benchmarks & progress
Alibaba releases Qwen2.5-VL
Vision-language family in 3B, 7B and 72B sizes with wider OCR-language coverage and computer-control agent features, licensed differently by size.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities
Alibaba releases QwQ-32B-Preview reasoning model
Built on Qwen2.5-32B and released under an Apache 2.0 licence, Alibaba flagged the model could enter circular reasoning loops and mix languages mid-response.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities
Alibaba releases Qwen2.5-Coder
Open-weight coding-specialised model family built on Qwen2.5, aimed at competing with DeepSeek-Coder and closed coding models.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities
Alibaba releases Qwen2.5 model family
Alibaba's release spanned seven sizes from 0.5B to 72B parameters, plus dedicated coding and maths variants, trained on 18 trillion tokens.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities
Alibaba releases Qwen2
Five model sizes from 0.5B to 72B parameters, trained on 27 additional languages beyond English and Chinese, with the smaller sizes under Apache 2.0.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities
Alibaba open-sources Qwen-7B
The 7-billion-parameter model, pretrained on over 2.2 trillion tokens, was released alongside a chat-tuned variant and pitched against Meta's Llama on benchmark scores.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities
Alibaba launches Tongyi Qianwen chatbot
Launched without advance notice and restricted to corporate clients and select media on an invite-only basis; Alibaba did not disclose a parameter count.
Models & capabilities
Also mentioned in 26 entries
Referenced in passing — Alibaba / Qwen isn't the main subject of these.
- May 2026Epoch AI: open models lag closed frontier by four months
- April 2026Meta launches Muse Spark, its first closed frontier model
- February 2026ByteDance unveils Doubao-Seed-2.0 model family
- January 2026Baidu launches ERNIE 5.0, a 2.4-trillion-parameter native multimodal model
- January 2026Anthropic maps the 'Assistant Axis' persona vector across open models
- December 2025Tencent releases Hunyuan 2.0
- November 2025AI2 releases Olmo 3 open frontier model family
- October 2025MiniMax open-sources MiniMax-M2 for coding and agentic workflows
- August 2025DeepSeek releases DeepSeek-V3.1 with hybrid reasoning mode
- August 2025ByteDance open-sources Seed-OSS-36B
- August 2025OpenAI publishes open-weight models for the first time since GPT-2
- July 2025Zhipu (Z.ai) releases GLM-4.5 series
- June 2025Baidu open-sources the ERNIE 4.5 model family
- June 2025ByteDance releases Doubao 1.6 model
- March 2025Mistral releases Mistral Small 3.1
- March 2025Google releases Gemma 3, an open model family built on Gemini 2.0
- March 2025Manus markets a fully autonomous agent from China
- January 2025Moonshot AI releases Kimi K1.5 reasoning model
- January 2025Shanghai AI Laboratory releases InternLM3
- January 2025Biden administration issues AI Diffusion Rule in final days of term
- December 2024DeepSeek releases V3
- November 2024AI2 releases OLMo 2
- November 2024Tencent open-sources Hunyuan-Large MoE model
- September 2024Meta releases Llama 3.2 with vision and edge models
- September 2024OpenAI releases o1, trading inference time for reasoning
- January 2024Zhipu launches GLM-4, claiming near-GPT-4 parity