Introducing the Qwen Series: Overview of Alibaba's Open-Source LLM Journey
Alibaba's Qwen team published a retrospective introduction to the Qwen series of large language models, four months after the initial Qwen-7B open-source release. The post consolidates links to their paper, GitHub, Hugging Face, and ModelScope repositories, and outlines the team's objectives for the open-source LLM program. It serves as a canonical reference point for the Qwen model family's public positioning.
Related guides (3)
Related events (8)
CodeQwen1.5: Alibaba's Open-Source Code LLM Release
Alibaba's Qwen team released CodeQwen1.5, an open-source large language model specialized for code generation and programming assistance. The release is positioned as a transparent, accessible alternative to proprietary coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, addressing concerns around cost, privacy, security, and copyright. The model is available on GitHub, HuggingFace, and ModelScope.
Qwen2.5: Large-Scale Open-Source Foundation Model Family Release
Alibaba's Qwen team has released Qwen2.5, described as potentially the largest open-source model release in history, following three months of development after Qwen2. The release encompasses a family of foundation models with improvements in knowledge and reasoning capabilities. The announcement targets developers who have been building on Qwen2 and incorporates feedback from that community.
Qwen2.5-LLM: Alibaba releases open-weight language models from 0.5B to 72B
Alibaba's Qwen team releases the Qwen2.5 series of decoder-only dense language models, open-sourcing seven variants spanning 0.5B to 72B parameters. The release targets production use cases in the 10-30B range and mobile deployments at 3B scale. This represents a significant expansion of the open-weights frontier from a Tier 1 Chinese AI lab.
Introducing Qwen1.5: Open-Source Models Across Eight Sizes Including MoE
Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen1.5, open-sourcing both base and chat models in eight sizes ranging from 0.5B to 110B parameters, plus a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) variant. The release emphasizes developer experience improvements alongside model quality. Models are available on GitHub, Hugging Face, and ModelScope.
Alibaba releases Qwen3.5 open-weights vision-language model family with MoE architecture across eight sizes
Alibaba released the Qwen3.5 family of eight open-weights vision-language models ranging from 0.8B to 397B parameters, built on a mixture-of-experts architecture with mixed attention and Gated DeltaNet layers. The flagship Qwen3.5-397B-A17B outperforms GPT-5.2, Claude 4.5 Opus, and Gemini-3 Pro on 28 of 44 vision benchmarks, while the 9B model surpasses OpenAI's gpt-oss-120B on most language tasks. Open weights are available under Apache 2.0, with hosted agentic variants (Qwen3.5-Plus, Qwen3.5-Flash) available via Alibaba Cloud. The release is notable for strong small-model efficiency and comes amid reported team departures following the Qwen3 rollout.
Qwen1.5-32B: Alibaba's 30B-Parameter Capstone for the Qwen1.5 Series
Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen1.5-32B, a ~30 billion parameter open-weights language model positioned as the capstone of the Qwen1.5 series. The model targets the emerging consensus around 30B parameters as an optimal balance between performance, memory footprint, and inference efficiency. It is released alongside code on GitHub, weights on HuggingFace and ModelScope, and an interactive demo.
Qwen2.5-VL: Alibaba's New Flagship Vision-Language Model Released in 3B/7B/72B Sizes
Alibaba's Qwen team has released Qwen2.5-VL, their new flagship vision-language model, representing a significant upgrade over Qwen2-VL. The release includes both base and instruct variants in three sizes (3B, 7B, 72B), all open-weighted and available on Hugging Face and ModelScope. The 72B instruct model is also accessible via Qwen Chat. Key capabilities highlighted include enhanced visual understanding, with the model positioned as a major step forward in multimodal performance.
Introducing Qwen2-Math: Math-Specialized LLMs from Alibaba's Qwen Team
Alibaba's Qwen team has released Qwen2-Math and Qwen2-Math-Instruct, a series of math-specialized large language models built on the Qwen2 architecture. The models are designed to enhance arithmetic and mathematical reasoning capabilities in LLMs. The initial release supports English only, with bilingual English/Chinese versions announced as forthcoming.