🌐 Qwen — Alibaba’s Open, Multimodal AI Powerhouse
From Qwen1.5 to Qwen3: A flexible, scalable and multilingual AI ecosystem
🔍 What is Qwen?
Qwen (short for Tongyi Qianwen) is the flagship AI model family from Alibaba Cloud, now fully open-source (Apache 2.0) ⚙️ .
It spans:
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Dense language models (0.5B–72B parameters)
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Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models (e.g. Qwen3 with 235B / 22B active)
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Multimodal variants — supporting text, vision (VL), audio, and even video
Qwen competes head-to-head with top proprietary models and is gaining global traction for its performance and openness.
🧠 Key Qwen Versions
🔷 Qwen 1.5
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Released in 2023 with sizes from 0.5B to 110B reuters.com+15medium.com+15geeky-gadgets.com+15neowin.nettime.com+15en.wikipedia.org+15reuters.com+15.
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Offers strong multilingual support (30+ languages), code, math, and reasoning.
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Includes chat-optimized versions like Qwen‑7B‑Chat.
🔷 Qwen 2 / 2.5
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Expanded to include MoE models and Qwen2-VL (Vision-Language multimodal family) qwen.readthedocs.io+4arxiv.org+4qwen.readthedocs.io+4reuters.com+15qwenlm.github.io+15maginative.com+15.
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Qwen2.5 models are trained on ~18 trillion tokens, with fine-tuned variants like Qwen2.5‑Coder and Qwen2.5‑Math ucadvanced.com+4qwenlm.github.io+4ru.wikipedia.org+4.
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Introduces Qwen2.5‑Omni‑7B, a compact multimodal model with real-time audio and video response capabilities reuters.com+15en.wikipedia.org+15alibabacloud.com+15.
🔷 Qwen 3
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Latest release (April 2025), including dense and MoE versions (0.6B–235B) medium.com+8en.wikipedia.org+8arxiv.org+8.
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Features hybrid “Thinking / Non-Thinking” modes, offering a balance between deep reasoning and fast responses arxiv.org+2qwenlm.github.io+2alibabacloud.com+2.
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Massive context window support (up to 128K tokens).
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Strong multilingual support (119 languages) — great for global use huggingface.co+1en.wikipedia.org+1medium.com.
🧩 What Makes Qwen Special
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Open-source, flexible, and transparent — ideal for research and custom deployment arxiv.org+4medium.com+4maginative.com+4.
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Full stack: text, code, logic, math, vision, audio, video — all in the same ecosystem .
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MoE efficiency: only portions of the full model activate per request — saving costs while maintaining capacity github.com+5cincodias.elpais.com+5qwenlm.github.io+5.
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Modular modes: instant choice between “thinking” (deep) and “non-thinking” (fast) cincodias.elpais.com+3qwenlm.github.io+3alibabacloud.com+3.
🎯 Where Qwen Fits in Your AI Toolbox
| Task Type | Best Qwen Version |
|---|---|
| Document + image analysis | Qwen2-VL, Qwen2.5-VL, Qwen2.5-Omni |
| Code, math & reasoning | Qwen2.5‑Coder, Qwen3‑MoE (Thinking) |
| Quick chat or summarizing | Qwen1.5, small Qwen3 (Non-Thinking) |
| Multilingual applications | Qwen3 (119 languages) |
| Custom workflows & agents | Use any of the open models via API or HuggingFace |