About company
Qwen (通义千问) is a family of advanced large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud's Qwen Team, representing one of the most significant breakthroughs in China's AI development. In July 2024, it was ranked as the top Chinese language model in some benchmarks and third globally behind the top models of Anthropic and OpenAI.
Initially launched as a beta in April 2023, Qwen has rapidly evolved into a comprehensive AI ecosystem. What sets Qwen apart is its strong commitment to open-source development and community engagement. Through comprehensive documentation, development tools, and resources available on platforms like Hugging Face and ModelScope, Alibaba has created an ecosystem that enables developers worldwide to leverage and build upon this technology.
The latest Qwen3 series introduces groundbreaking hybrid reasoning capabilities. Qwen3 is also Alibaba's debut into so-called "hybrid reasoning models," which it says combines traditional LLM capabilities with "advanced, dynamic reasoning." According to Alibaba, such models can seamlessly transition between a "thinking mode" for complex tasks such as coding and a "non-thinking mode" for faster, general-purpose responses.
The model family spans from compact 0.6B parameter models to powerful 235B parameter systems, offering both dense and Mixture-of-Experts architectures. The Qwen3 models support 119 languages, Alibaba said, and were trained on a dataset of over 36 trillion tokens. According to Alibaba, Qwen has already become one of the world's most widely adopted open-source AI model series, attracting over 300 million downloads worldwide, demonstrating exceptional performance in coding, mathematics, multilingual tasks, and tool integration while maintaining cost-effectiveness compared to Western counterparts.