Qwen

Qwen (also known as Tongyi Qianwen, Chinese: 通义千问; pinyin: Tōngyì Qiānwèn) is a family of predominantly open weightslarge and small language models (LLM and SLM) developed by Alibaba Cloud.

Its latest version, Qwen3.8; the 2.4 trillion parameter model was the second largest and second most powerful open weights LLM and Chinese LLM released by 12 August 2026, after Kimi K3. Larger versions often a revenue sharing agreement from providers generating more than US$50 million annually. The distilled Qwen3.8 27B was released under a more permissive Apache License.

The first iteration of Qwen, based on Meta AI's Llama 1, launched a beta in April 2023, releasing the weights of its 72B model that December.

A local version of Qwen used by Apple Intelligence in China, integrated with the operating system. Permissive licenses and smaller releases make them a common starting point for further fine-tuned and abliterated models in the open-source community.