Qwen
artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Alibaba Cloud
Qwen (also known as Tongyi Qianwen, Chinese: 通义千问; pinyin: Tōngyì Qiānwèn) is a family of predominantly open weights large 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 models require 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 is 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.
Models
Qwen
Alibaba launched a beta of Qwen in April 2023 under the name Tongyi Qianwen, then opened it for public use in September 2023 after regulatory clearance.
The model's architecture was based on the Llama architecture developed by Meta AI. In December 2023, it released its 72B and 1.8B models for download, while Qwen 7B weights were released in August.
Qwen2
Qwen2 was released in June 2024, and in September it released some of its models with open weights, while keeping its most advanced models proprietary.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Qwen” is artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Alibaba Cloud. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Qwen, artificial and intelligence, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q130234299. 2 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 4 carry qualifiers and 2 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2026, 2023 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Qwen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.