Chinese language tech firm Alibaba on Monday launched Qwen3, a household of AI fashions the corporate claims matches and in some circumstances outperforms the perfect fashions accessible from Google and OpenAI.
Many of the fashions are — or quickly shall be — accessible for obtain underneath an “open” license from AI dev platform Hugging Face and Girub. They vary in measurement from 0.6 billion parameters to 235 billion parameters. Parameters roughly correspond to a mannequin’s problem-solving abilities, and fashions with extra parameters usually carry out higher than these with fewer parameters.
The rise of China-originated mannequin collection like Qwen have elevated the stress on American labs equivalent to OpenAI to ship extra succesful AI applied sciences. They’ve additionally led policymakers to implement restrictions aimed toward limiting the power of Chinese language AI firms to acquire the chips obligatory to coach fashions.
Introducing Qwen3!
We launch and open-weight Qwen3, our newest giant language fashions, together with 2 MoE fashions and 6 dense fashions, starting from 0.6B to 235B. Our flagship mannequin, Qwen3-235B-A22B, achieves aggressive leads to benchmark evaluations of coding, math, common… pic.twitter.com/JWZkJeHWhC
— Qwen (@Alibaba_Qwen) April 28, 2025
In response to Alibaba, Qwen3 fashions are “hybrid” fashions within the sense that they will take time and “cause” by way of advanced issues or reply less complicated requests rapidly. Reasoning permits the fashions to successfully fact-check themselves, much like fashions like OpenAI’s o3, however at the price of increased latency.
“We’ve seamlessly built-in pondering and non-thinking modes, providing customers the pliability to manage the pondering finances,” wrote the Qwen staff in a weblog submit. “This design permits customers to configure task-specific budgets with higher ease.”
Among the fashions additionally undertake a combination of consultants (MoE) structure, which may be extra computationally environment friendly for answering queries. MoE breaks down duties into subtasks and delegates them to smaller, specialised “knowledgeable” fashions.
The Qwen3 fashions help 119 languages, Alibaba says, and had been skilled on a dataset of almost 36 trillion tokens. Tokens are the uncooked bits of knowledge {that a} mannequin processes; 1 million tokens is equal to about 750,000 phrases. Alibaba says that Qwen3 was skilled on a mixture of textbooks, “question-answer pairs,” code snippets, AI-generated information, and extra.
These enhancements, together with others, vastly boosted Qwen3’s capabilities in comparison with its predecessor, Qwen2, says Alibaba. Not one of the Qwen3 fashions are head and shoulders above top-of-the-line current fashions like OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini, however they’re robust performers nonetheless.
On Codeforces, a platform for programming contests, the most important Qwen3 mannequin — Qwen-3-235B-A22B — simply beats out OpenAI’s o3-mini and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Professional. Qwen-3-235B-A22B additionally bests o3-mini on the most recent model of AIME, a difficult math benchmark, and BFCL, a check for assessing a mannequin’s skill to “cause” about issues.
However Qwen-3-235B-A22B isn’t publicly accessible — at the least not but.
Alibaba’s inside benchmark outcomes for Qwen3.Picture Credit:Alibaba
The biggest public Qwen3 mannequin, Qwen3-32B, remains to be aggressive with numerous proprietary and open AI fashions, together with Chinese language AI lab DeepSeek’s R1. Qwen3-32B surpasses OpenAI’s o1 mannequin on a number of checks, together with the coding benchmark LiveCodeBench.
Alibaba says Qwen3 “excels” in tool-calling capabilities in addition to following directions and copying particular information codecs. Along with the fashions for obtain, Qwen3 is out there from cloud suppliers, together with Fireworks AI and Hyperbolic.
Tuhin Srivastava, co-founder and CEO of AI cloud host Baseten, stated that Qwen3 is one other level within the pattern line of open fashions preserving tempo with closed supply methods equivalent to OpenAI’s.
“The U.S. is doubling down on proscribing gross sales of chips to China and purchases from China, however fashions like Qwen 3 which are state-of-the-art and open … will undoubtedly be used domestically,” he advised TechCrunch. “It displays the fact that companies are each constructing their very own instruments (in addition to) shopping for off the shelf through closed-model firms like Anthropic and OpenAI.”
