Qwen

Editorial Review

Qwen has rapidly become one of the most significant open-source AI model families available. Developed by Alibaba Cloud, the Qwen3 series offers models that compete with proprietary alternatives — while remaining freely available under the Apache 2.0 license. With dozens of open-weight releases and tens of millions of downloads on Hugging Face, it has built a massive global community. The flagship Qwen3-235B-A22B uses a Mixture-of-Experts architecture with only 22B active parameters at inference, delivering strong performance at dramatically lower computational cost than comparable dense models. Long context windows up to 256K tokens and support for over 100 languages make it one of the most versatile open models available. The hybrid thinking modes let users explicitly trade reasoning depth against latency and cost on a per-request basis. For developers, Qwen offers multiple deployment paths: the free chat.qwen.ai interface for casual use, API access through Alibaba Cloud's DashScope, or full self-hosting via popular tools like Ollama and LM Studio. This flexibility makes it suitable for everything from individual experimentation to enterprise-scale deployments. Multimodal variants like Qwen3-VL and Qwen3-Audio extend the family beyond text into vision and speech, making it a credible end-to-end alternative to closed multimodal stacks.