Qwen grew out of Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen. It first appeared through products and cloud services in 2023, then spread through open-weight 7B, 14B, 72B, and related releases.
Today / Sunday, September 27, 2026
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Sep 27, 08:41 AM
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Model Brief
Alibaba's model family spanning general, coding, multimodal, and open ecosystem releases.
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Qwen is Alibaba's model family spanning general language models, coding, multimodal models, mathematical reasoning, tool use, and open-weight releases. It is closely watched for Chinese, multilingual, and coding performance, and spreads through open communities and ecosystems such as ModelScope.
Qwen is especially important for Chinese users and developers because it combines cloud APIs, open models, and enterprise deployment options. Its updates often affect Chinese-language assistants, coding tools, agentic tool use, enterprise knowledge bases, and localized AI application stacks.
Timeline
The Qwen2 and Qwen2.5 phases expanded into coding, vision, audio, and mathematical reasoning, while QwQ-style releases pushed the family into reasoning-model competition.
From Qwen3 onward, Alibaba has advanced open weights, cloud APIs, specialized coding models, and multimodal models in parallel, making Qwen one of the most active model families in the Chinese developer ecosystem.
Heat / Trend
Discussion Heat Trend
Real community signals: HN points/comments + GitHub stars/forks
Total Heat
3106
Stories
8
Peak Day
07/01
Community / HN + GitHub
Community Discussion
Recent Hacker News and GitHub signals that add community context beyond the news feed.
HN
4
GitHub
4
Heat
3106
QwenLM/qwen-code
Score
834
Stars
25694
Forks
2584
QwenLM/Qwen3-VL
Score
794
Stars
19501
Forks
1798
QwenLM/Qwen3
Score
742
Stars
27346
Forks
1999
QwenLM/Qwen
Score
724
Stars
21366
Forks
1842
Show HN: Cline subscription plan to access GLM-5.2 at 2-5x discount
Score
7
Comments
2
Source
HN
Qwen3.5 2B burns all the output tokens while thinking
Score
2
Comments
0
Source
HN
Show HN: Apex-1-flash, 4B LLM finetuned on RTX 5070
Score
2
Comments
0
Source
HN
Show HN:Swarm intelligence without degradation using two Qwen models
Score
1
Comments
0
Source
HN
official / Qwen
Official Updates
Qwen3Guard: Real-time Safety for Your Token Stream
Tech Report GitHub Hugging Face ModelScope DISCORD Introduction We are excited to introduce Qwen3Guard, the first safety guardrail model in the Qwen family.
Qwen-Image-Edit: Image Editing with Higher Quality and Efficiency
QWEN CHAT GITHUB HUGGING FACE MODELSCOPE DISCORD We are excited to introduce Qwen-Image-Edit, the image editing version of Qwen-Image. Built upon our 20B Qwen-Image model, Qwen-Image-Edit successfully extends Qwen-Image’s unique text rendering capabiliti...
media / Qwen
Media Coverage

Alibaba's new Qwen model is also taking your job, but this time it's great
Alibaba is marketing its new AI model Qwen 3.8 with a video that shows the AI working while a person enjoys their hobbies. It's a deliberate contrast to the job loss warnings from OpenAI and Anthropic. Of course, it's still just marketing.

Alibaba's Wan3.0 generates AI videos up to 30 seconds long from text, images, and documents
Alibaba's video generation model Wan3.0 creates clips up to 30 seconds long from text, PDFs, and PowerPoint files. A 30-second 1080p clip costs $6. Alibaba's quarterly profit dropped 75 percent year-over-year as the company ramps up AI spending.
research / Qwen
Research Papers

Alibaba's open-weight Qwen-Image-2.1 claims to beat closed models in image generation with just 7 billion para...
Alibaba's Qwen team has released Qwen-Image-2.1, an open-weight model that generates and edits images on powerful consumer GPUs, with support for transparency and up to ten reference images at once.

Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash undercuts Google's Gemini Flash pricing while matching its multimodal benchmarks
Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash is Qwen's first multimodal model designed for AI agents. It processes audio and video together and independently uses tools to edit vlogs, translate clips, or summarize movies. On audio-video benchmarks, it nearly matches Gemini 3.

Iris-mini and Iris-pro are the strongest open-weight search agents in their class
The AllSpark team has released Iris-mini and Iris-pro, two open-source search agents built on Qwen models that lead benchmarks among open-weight models in their size classes.

An Empirical Study of Counterfactual Self-Explanations in LLMs
Large language models can easily generate explanations for their own outputs, but such self-explanations are not necessarily faithful to the model's behavior.

It's Not What You Say, It's How You Say It: Evaluating LLM Responses to Expressions of Belief
Users frequently express their beliefs to large language models (LLMs). In some situations, the LLM should accept these contextual beliefs as true. In others, they should stick to their prior knowledge.

OpenThoughts-Agent: Data Recipes for Agentic Models
Agentic language models dramatically expand the applications of AI yet little is publicly known about how to curate training data for broadly capable agents.
community / Qwen
Community & Open Source

Alibaba's Qwen team releases Qwen 3.8 models with open weights under the Apache 2.0 license
Alibaba's AI team Qwen has released new open model weights under the Apache 2.0 license with Qwen 3.8. The dense 27-billion-parameter model is designed to outperform the larger Qwen 3.

Alibaba's Qwen takes on Kimi K3 with open-weight Qwen 3.8, says model is "second only to Fable 5"
Alibaba has unveiled Qwen 3.8, a multimodal AI model with 2.4 trillion parameters that the Qwen team says rivals leading models and trails only Fable 5. A preview is available now. The article Alibaba's Qwen takes on Kimi K3 with open-weight Qwen 3.