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Model

Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen, 2023)

Qwen, known in Chinese as Tongyi Qianwen (通义千问), is Alibaba's family of large language models. Its first open-weight model, Qwen-7B, was released on 3 August 2023, and the family has grown through many later versions.

Status DeprecatedModality TextOpen weights YesContext (K tokens) 32 Era Generative AI for everyone

Parameters
72B
License
Open weights
Access
API, App, Download
Release date
Developer
Alibaba Cloud

What it is

Qwen is a family of large language models developed by Alibaba. In China it is called Tongyi Qianwen (通义千问), and the international releases use the name Qwen. The family spans several parameter sizes, from 1.8 billion to 72 billion parameters, and some of its models have been released with open weights, meaning the trained parameters are published for anyone to download and run.

Origins

Alibaba launched Tongyi Qianwen as a beta in April 2023. It was opened to the public in September 2023, after regulatory clearance. According to Wikipedia, the original architecture was based on Meta's Llama.[1] The first open-weight model in the family, Qwen-7B, followed on 3 August 2023.[2]

Main features

The first release covered several sizes. Qwen-7B came out on 3 August 2023, Qwen-14B on 25 September 2023, and Qwen-1.8B and Qwen-72B on 30 November 2023.[2] Each model was trained on a large pool of text before release. The pre-training data was 2.2 trillion tokens for Qwen-1.8B, 2.4 trillion tokens for Qwen-7B, and 3.0 trillion tokens for Qwen-14B and Qwen-72B.[2] A token is the unit of text a model reads and writes, roughly a word or a fragment of a word.

The context window, which is how much text a model can take into account at once, was 32K tokens for Qwen-1.8B, Qwen-7B and Qwen-72B, and 8K tokens for Qwen-14B.[2] On the 5-shot MMLU benchmark, a multi-subject test of knowledge and reasoning, Qwen-72B scored 77.4.[2]

The models also differed in licensing. Qwen-7B, Qwen-14B and Qwen-72B were released under the Tongyi Qianwen License Agreement, which grants commercial use by application. Qwen-1.8B used a research license.[2]

Its place in development

The Qwen language model became the base for the Qwen-VL family of vision-language models, released in August 2023.[3] The original Qwen repository is no longer maintained. It was superseded by Qwen1.5 in February 2024 and by Qwen2 in June 2024.[2]

The early releases therefore mark the starting point of the series that the later entries describe.

CapabilitiesLarge language models

TechniquesFoundation models

Ecosystem & regionOpen sourceChina

Version history

14
  1. 2023
    • Aug 3, 2023 Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen, 2023) · This page

      Qwen, known in Chinese as Tongyi Qianwen (通义千问), is Alibaba's family of large language models. Its first open-weight model, Qwen-7B, was released on 3 August 2023, and the family has grown through many later versions.

  2. 2024
    • Feb 5, 2024 Qwen1.5

      Qwen1.5 is the Qwen family's open model release of February 2024, with base and chat models from 0.5B to 72B parameters, later extended to 110B, and a mixture-of-experts model.

    • Jun 7, 2024 Qwen2

      Qwen2 is the Qwen family's June 2024 generation, with five sizes from 0.5B to 72B parameters, context lengths up to 128K tokens, and most sizes released under Apache 2.0.

    • Sep 19, 2024 Qwen2.5

      Qwen2.5 is the Qwen family's September 2024 generation. Its launch included 13 open-weight models, with up to 18 trillion pretraining tokens, 128K context and most models under Apache 2.0.

    • Nov 28, 2024 QwQ-32B-Preview

      QwQ-32B-Preview is an experimental reasoning research model released by the Qwen team on 28 November 2024, with 32B parameters, a 32K-token context and open Apache 2.0 weights. It scored strongly on maths benchmarks but the team documented clear failure modes.

  3. 2025
    • Jan 28, 2025 Qwen2.5-Max

      Qwen2.5-Max is Alibaba's large mixture-of-experts model, announced in January 2025. It was offered through Qwen Chat and the Alibaba Cloud API, and its weights were not released.

    • Mar 6, 2025 QwQ-32B

      A 32-billion-parameter open-weight reasoning model released by the Qwen team on 6 March 2025, trained mainly through scaled reinforcement learning and reported to perform comparably to the much larger DeepSeek-R1.

    • Apr 29, 2025 Qwen3

      Qwen3 is a family of large language models from Alibaba, released on 29 April 2025 under Apache 2.0. Its main feature is hybrid thinking, which lets one model reason step by step or answer directly.

    • Jul 21, 2025 Qwen3-2507

      Qwen3-2507 is a staged 2025 refresh of the open-weight Qwen3 models that split thinking and non-thinking into separate checkpoints, raised native context to 262,144 tokens, and scored far above the original non-thinking mode on published benchmarks.

    • Sep 2025 Qwen3-Max

      Qwen3-Max is Alibaba's proprietary trillion-parameter language model, released in September 2025 and served through Alibaba's API. It is the Max-tier flagship that followed Qwen2.5-Max.

    • Sep 2025 Qwen3-Next

      Qwen3-Next is an open-weight model from Alibaba's Qwen team, released in September 2025 under Apache 2.0. It has 80B total parameters, only 3B active per token, and a hybrid attention design later used in Qwen3.5.

  4. 2026
    • Feb 16, 2026 Qwen3.5

      Qwen3.5 is a natively multimodal model family from Alibaba released in February 2026. Its open flagship, Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, has 397B total parameters and 17B active per token, under Apache 2.0.

    • Apr 2, 2026 Qwen3.6

      A generation of Alibaba's Qwen models released in April 2026, spanning proprietary Plus and Max versions aimed at agentic coding and open-weight models such as Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, a 35B-parameter mixture-of-experts with 3B active parameters.

    • Aug 3, 2026 Qwen3.8

      Qwen3.8 is Alibaba's 2026 flagship line. Its open 2.4-trillion-parameter model, Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B, released in August 2026, has 95B active parameters and a custom license.

20232

  1. ReleaseAlibaba open-sources Qwen-7B, its first open-weight model

    Alibaba's first open-weight Qwen releases: Qwen-7B appeared on 3 August 2023, followed by 14B, 1.8B and 72B models, giving outside developers downloadable models from small to large, with published training volumes, context limits and benchmark scores.

  2. ReleaseAlibaba launches the Tongyi Qianwen chatbot model

    In April 2023 Alibaba launched Tongyi Qianwen as a beta, and in September 2023 it opened the model to the public. The project later took the international name Qwen.

Developed by1

Alibaba Cloud

Foundation for1

Qwen-VL

Succeeded by1

Qwen1.5

Powers1

Qwen app (Tongyi)

Uses1

Transformer

Notes and sources

  1. Qwenhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwen
  2. QwenLM/Qwen repositoryhttps://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen
  3. Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyondhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2308.12966

Cite this page: Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen, 2023). TellWorld, https://www.tellworld.net/models/qwen. Updated 2026-11-08