Tongyi Qianwen

Tongyi Qianwen (通义千问), the brand often glossed in English as "seeking truth by asking a thousand questions," is Alibaba Group's flagship large language model and conversational AI brand, launched by Alibaba Cloud on April 11, 2023 as China's answer to ChatGPT.^[1][2] The name covers both Alibaba's consumer chatbot app and the Qwen family of underlying models developed by the company's Tongyi Lab. The consumer app was renamed "Tongyi" in May 2024 and relaunched as the Qwen app (千问, Qianwen) in a public beta on November 17, 2025.^[24][26] On March 2, 2026, Alibaba formally retired the "Tongyi Qianwen" name and unified its large models and AI applications under the single brand "Qwen," with the Qwen app as the flagship consumer product.^[11][27]

Tongyi Qianwen supports text-based conversation, image understanding, document analysis, code generation, and multimodal interactions. The platform was part of a broader suite of AI tools under the Tongyi brand, including Tongyi Wanxiang for image generation and Tongyi Tingwu for audio and meeting summarization. After its relaunch as Qwen, the consumer app reached a peak of 73.52 million daily active users on February 7, 2026, during its Lunar New Year promotion (a roughly 940% jump, according to TechNode^[11]), while the open-weight Qwen models surpassed 700 million cumulative downloads on Hugging Face, overtaking Meta's Llama as the most downloaded open model family in the world.^[21][22] In June 2026, data firm QuestMobile ranked the Qwen app second among China's standalone AI apps with about 167 million monthly active users, behind ByteDance's Doubao, while estimating that Qwen accounted for most of the advertising spending among the three AI assistants it tracks.^[32][34]

What does "Tongyi Qianwen" mean and what is it?

The Chinese name 通义千问 combines "Tongyi" (通义, "common meaning" or "understanding") with "Qianwen" (千问, "a thousand questions"), commonly translated as "seeking truth by asking a thousand questions."^[2] As a product, Tongyi Qianwen referred both to a consumer chatbot (a mobile and web app) and to the brand for the Qwen family of large language models that power it. The models themselves were always called "Qwen" in English from the first open release in 2023; "Tongyi Qianwen" served as the broader brand and the name of the consumer assistant in China. Detailed model specifications live on the Qwen and Qwen 3 pages.

History

When was Tongyi Qianwen launched?

Alibaba Cloud unveiled Tongyi Qianwen on April 11, 2023, during a press event in Beijing.^[1][2] The announcement positioned it as a direct competitor to ChatGPT and other conversational AI systems that had emerged in late 2022 and early 2023. At launch, the model supported both Chinese and English language capabilities.^[2] Alibaba Cloud's enterprise customers in China were given access to Tongyi Qianwen for beta testing, with an initial deployment on DingTalk (Alibaba's workplace messaging platform) and Tmall Genie (Alibaba's smart home assistant).^[1]

Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang, who presented the product at a conference in Beijing, said all of Alibaba's business units would eventually integrate Tongyi Qianwen, signaling the company's intent to weave generative AI throughout its entire ecosystem.^[1] Alibaba demonstrated the assistant transcribing meeting notes, drafting business pitches, and writing children's stories.^[2]

Public Release (September 2023)

After receiving regulatory approval from China's Cyberspace Administration, Alibaba opened Tongyi Qianwen for public use in September 2023. Users in China could access the chatbot through its official website and a dedicated mobile application. Enterprise customers gained access through the Tongyi API.

Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 (October 2023)

At the annual Apsara Conference on October 31, 2023, Alibaba Cloud announced Tongyi Qianwen 2.0.^[3] The upgraded version featured an expanded model size and improved alignment techniques. Alibaba highlighted improvements in understanding complex instructions, copywriting, logical reasoning, memorization, and hallucination prevention.^[3] Alongside the model update, Alibaba Cloud also introduced industry-specific models tailored for sectors such as finance, legal, and healthcare.^[3]

App renamed Tongyi (2024), then relaunched as Qwen (2025)

On May 9, 2024, the "Tongyi Qianwen" app was renamed "Tongyi" (通义) and opened its full feature set to all users free of charge. The renamed app bundled long-document processing (up to 10 million Chinese characters in one pass, or 100 documents at once), audio and video understanding, image and video generation, and the Tongyi Lingma coding assistant.^[24]

On November 17, 2025, Alibaba launched a public beta of an upgraded and renamed version of the Tongyi app called Qwen (千问, Qianwen), on major app stores and with web and PC versions released at the same time.^[26] Alibaba described it as a "personal AI assistant that can chat and get everything done," said it ran on the Qwen3 model, and said it planned to add maps, food delivery, ticket booking, office tools, education, shopping and healthcare services.^[25][26] The company said the app passed 10 million downloads in its first week.^[25]

Why did Alibaba rename Tongyi Qianwen to Qwen?

On March 2, 2026, Alibaba Group announced a brand integration plan, unifying its large models and AI applications for business and consumer users under the single name "Qwen."^[11][27] The Chinese brand name of the models became "千问大模型" while the English brand became simply "Qwen," and the older "Tongyi Qianwen" name was formally retired.^[11][27] The Qwen app, which had carried the Qwen name since November 2025, was named the flagship consumer application and described as "Alibaba's AI assistant."^[11][27] Tongyi Lab continues to exist as the organizational name of Alibaba Group's AI research and development institution.^[11] Alibaba said the integration was meant to strengthen recognition of its AI brand and the cohesion of its ecosystem.^[27]

Core Features and Capabilities

Text Chat and Conversation

The primary interface of Tongyi Qianwen is a conversational chatbot that responds to user queries in natural language. It handles tasks such as writing assistance, brainstorming, question answering, translation, and general knowledge queries. The system supports both Chinese and English, along with dozens of additional languages as the underlying Qwen models expanded their multilingual coverage. Qwen3 extended language support to 119 languages and dialects, up from 29 in Qwen2.5.^[7]

Image Understanding

Through integration with Qwen's vision-language models (such as Qwen-VL and later Qwen2.5-VL), Tongyi Qianwen can analyze and describe uploaded images, answer questions about visual content, and extract text from screenshots or photographs. The Qwen2.5-VL series, released in January 2025, came in variants of 3B, 7B, 32B, and 72B parameters and demonstrated strong performance on visual reasoning benchmarks.

Document Analysis

Tongyi Qianwen supports long-document parsing across multiple file formats, including PDF, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. The platform can automatically extract key points, generate summaries, create tables from unstructured text, and locate specific clauses within lengthy contracts or reports. Testing showed the system handling documents exceeding 100 pages while producing key point summaries and table generation within minutes.

Code Generation

Alibaba developed specialized coding models within the Qwen family. The Qwen2.5-Coder series, released in late 2024, offered models ranging from 0.5B to 32B parameters.^[17] The Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct model achieved state-of-the-art performance among open-source code models on benchmarks such as EvalPlus, LiveCodeBench, and BigCodeBench, with code generation capabilities comparable to GPT-4o.^[17] It supported more than 40 programming languages.^[17]

In July 2025, Alibaba released the Qwen3-Coder series, with the flagship Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct model built on a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture containing 480 billion total parameters with 35 billion activated per token.^[16] This model was designed for agentic AI coding tasks, including generating new code, managing complex workflows, and debugging across entire codebases.^[16]

Tongyi Product Suite

Tongyi Wanxiang (Image Generation)

Alibaba Cloud unveiled Tongyi Wanxiang (通义万相, meaning "ten thousand images") at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in July 2023.^[4] The model generates images from text prompts in Chinese and English, supporting styles including watercolor, oil painting, Chinese ink painting, animation, sketch, flat illustration, and 3D cartoon.^[4]

Tongyi Wanxiang was built using Composer, Alibaba Cloud's proprietary model architecture that provides control over spatial layout, color palette, and composition while maintaining image quality.^[4] The model also supports image-to-image transformation and style transfer, where the content of an original image is preserved while applying the visual style of another picture.^[4]

In late 2025, Alibaba Cloud introduced Wanx 2.1, the latest iteration, which expanded capabilities to include high-quality video generation from text input alongside image generation.^[19] In January 2026, Alibaba open-sourced Qwen-Image-2512 as a competitive alternative to other image generation AI systems.

Tongyi Tingwu (Meeting Summarization)

Tongyi Tingwu (通义听悟, meaning "listen and understand") is Alibaba Cloud's AI-powered audio and video processing tool. Originally an internal tool called Tingwu used for transcribing project meetings at Alibaba's investment and human resources departments, it was enhanced with large language model capabilities and launched publicly in June 2023.^[5]

Tingwu provides real-time transcription of meetings and audio content, automatic speaker identification, chapter division of audio and video content, full-text and per-speaker summaries, key point highlighting, to-do item extraction, and real-time bilingual subtitle translation.^[5] The platform integrates with DingTalk, allowing users to automatically transcribe and summarize meetings conducted through Alibaba's workplace communication app.^[5]

Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (Bailian)

Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, known in Chinese as Bailian (百炼, meaning "refined through a hundred processes"), is a one-stop platform for building applications using large language models.^[20] The platform provides access to over 200 models, including the Qwen language model family, Qwen2-VL for visual understanding, and CosyVoice for speech synthesis.^[20]

Platform Capabilities

Bailian offers tools for model fine-tuning, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agent development.^[20] At the 2025 Yunqi Conference, Alibaba Cloud upgraded the Bailian platform to support agent development kits, governance features, and AI guardrails for compliance.

The platform introduced real-time audio and video interaction capabilities in 2024, enabling businesses to build multimodal AI applications without writing code. By 2025, the average daily model call volume on Bailian had increased 15-fold compared to the previous year.

What is Tongyi Qianwen's market position in China?

In the first half of 2025, Alibaba Cloud accounted for 35.8% of China's AI cloud market, ranking first among all providers and exceeding the combined share of the second through fourth largest competitors.^[23] ByteDance's Volcano Engine ranked second at 14.8%, Huawei Cloud third at 13.1%, Tencent Cloud at 7%, and Baidu Cloud fifth at 6.1%.^[23] The Bailian platform serves as a key driver of this market position, providing enterprise customers with the infrastructure to deploy Qwen models for their specific use cases.

Integration Across the Alibaba Ecosystem

Alibaba Group integrated Tongyi Qianwen across multiple business units, making it one of the most broadly deployed enterprise AI systems in China.

DingTalk

DingTalk, Alibaba's workplace communication platform with hundreds of millions of users, was the first product to integrate Tongyi Qianwen.^[1] AI-powered features include meeting note summarization, converting spoken conversations to text, email drafting, and business proposal generation. The integration allows users to interact with the AI assistant directly within their existing workflow without switching applications.

Taobao and E-Commerce

Alibaba integrated Tongyi Qianwen into Taobao, its flagship e-commerce platform, as a generative-AI-powered personal assistant.^[6] The integration refines product search for users by understanding natural language queries, providing tailored product recommendations, and offering conversational support during the shopping experience.^[6] Merchants on Taobao can also use AI tools for product description writing and customer service automation.^[6]

Agentic services in the Qwen app (2026)

On January 15, 2026, Alibaba put into public testing an upgrade that connected the Qwen app to Taobao, Taobao Instant Commerce, Alipay, Fliggy and Amap, so that users could order food, shop and book travel inside the chat without switching apps.^[28][29] Payment through Alipay initially covered instant commerce orders, and a "Task Assistant" in invite-only beta could place real phone calls to restaurants, process up to 100 documents at once and plan multi-stop trips.^[28] Alibaba vice president Wu Jia called the launch "a shift from models that understand to systems that act."^[28] Yicai reported that Alibaba had set up a dedicated Qwen Consumer Business Group in December 2025.^[29]

On May 10, 2026, Reuters reported, citing a source familiar with the decision, that Alibaba was preparing to integrate Qwen with Taobao, giving the Qwen app access to the Taobao and Tmall catalog of more than 4 billion products, backed by a "skills library" for logistics and after-sales service, and launching a Qwen-powered shopping assistant inside Taobao with virtual try-on and 30-day price tracking.^[37]

At the Yunqi (Apsara) Conference on September 22, 2026, Qwen product lead Zheng Sishou said the team was building a "Personal Agent" on the agentic capabilities of the Qwen3.8 model series for the app's 300 million users, a company figure. Qwen said its open platform for third-party services covered more than 20 domains and that more than 1,000 partners had applied to join.^[38] On October 13, 2026, reports described trials of Qwen Go!, a personal agent that Alibaba was preparing to introduce in the app, handling tasks such as flight-delay compensation claims, shopping refunds, car-servicing appointments and sports-venue bookings, with its actions shown on screen so the user could step in or stop it.^[39]

Cainiao Smart Logistics

Cainiao, Alibaba's global logistics arm, has applied AI capabilities to optimize delivery routing, warehouse operations, and package tracking. The integration of large language model technology assists in customer service automation and logistics planning across Cainiao's international shipping network.

Other Business Units

Tongyi Qianwen has also been deployed in Tmall Genie (smart home devices), Amap (navigation and mapping), Youku (video streaming), and Fliggy (travel services). Alibaba Group's leadership identified "User First" and "AI-driven" as the two core strategies for the company, with Tongyi Qianwen serving as the central element of this transformation.

The Qwen Model Family

The Qwen (通义千问) model family forms the technical foundation of all Tongyi products. Developed by Alibaba's Tongyi Lab, the models have gone through several major generations.^[14]

Model Versions Timeline

Qwen3 Architecture

Released on April 28, 2025, the Qwen3 family includes both dense models (0.6B, 1.7B, 4B, 8B, 14B, and 32B parameters) and Mixture-of-Experts models (Qwen3-30B-A3B and the flagship Qwen3-235B-A22B).^[7] The models were trained on 36 trillion tokens in 119 languages and dialects.^[7] A notable innovation in Qwen3 is the unified thinking/non-thinking mode, which integrates complex multi-step reasoning and rapid context-driven responses into a single model, eliminating the need to switch between separate chat and reasoning models.^[7]

Qwen3 showed density improvements of roughly 50%, meaning that Qwen3-1.7B, Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-8B, Qwen3-14B, and Qwen3-32B matched the performance of Qwen2.5-3B, Qwen2.5-7B, Qwen2.5-14B, Qwen2.5-32B, and Qwen2.5-72B, respectively.^[7] All Qwen3 models were released under the Apache 2.0 license.^[7]

Qwen3.5 Architecture

Released on February 16, 2026, Qwen3.5 is a native vision-language model series built on a Sparse MoE architecture.^[12] The flagship Qwen3.5-397B-A17B packs 397 billion total parameters but activates only 17 billion per token.^[12] The series includes eight models ranging from 0.8B to 397B parameters, with additional sizes released on February 24, 2026, including Qwen3.5-122B-A10B (supporting 1M+ context lengths), Qwen3.5-35B-A3B, and Qwen3.5-27B. Qwen3.5 expanded multilingual support to 201 languages and dialects.^[12]

QwQ Reasoning Models

Alibaba introduced QwQ (Qwen-with-Questions) in November 2024 as a reasoning model designed to compete with OpenAI's o1 series. The initial QwQ-32B-Preview was released under the Apache 2.0 license. In March 2025, the improved QwQ-32B was open-sourced, featuring 32.5 billion parameters and a 131,072-token context window.^[9] The model was trained using reinforcement learning and structured self-questioning, showing performance comparable to DeepSeek-R1 on math and coding benchmarks.^[9] Alibaba's stock price rose more than 8% following the QwQ-32B release.^[9]

Qwen2.5-Omni Multimodal Model

Released in March 2025, Qwen2.5-Omni is an end-to-end multimodal model that perceives text, images, audio, and video while generating both text and natural speech responses in a streaming manner.^[8] The model uses a novel Thinker-Talker architecture: the Thinker component processes and understands inputs from all modalities, while the Talker component generates speech output.^[8] It also employs TMRoPE (Time-aligned Multimodal RoPE) to synchronize video and audio timestamps.^[8] Variants include the 7B and 3B parameter sizes, with 4-bit quantized versions available that reduce GPU memory consumption by over 50%.

Is Tongyi Qianwen open source?

Alibaba has been one of the most active contributors to the open-source AI ecosystem globally. By January 2026, the company had open-sourced close to 400 Qwen models, and the family surpassed 700 million cumulative downloads on Hugging Face, overtaking Meta's Llama as the most downloaded open model family in the world.^[22] In a single month in late 2025, Qwen downloads exceeded the combined total of the next eight most popular model families.^[22]

Licensing Approach

Most Qwen model variants are distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, which permits commercial use, modification, and redistribution.^[13] However, Alibaba follows a tiered strategy: the most advanced proprietary models (such as Qwen2.5-Max and Qwen3-Max) remain closed-source and are served through Alibaba Cloud, while smaller and mid-sized models are open-sourced to encourage community adoption and ecosystem development.

Community Impact

The global open-source community has built more than 200,000 derivative models based on Qwen on Hugging Face, and Qwen models have repeatedly topped open-model leaderboards.^[22] In April 2025, Alibaba's Qwen2.5-Omni topped Hugging Face's open-source AI model trending list.

The Tongyi Qianwen team from Alibaba won the Best Paper Award at NeurIPS 2025 for their paper "Attention Gating Makes Better Foundation Models," the only Chinese entry among the four winning papers at the conference.^[18] In November 2025, Singapore's National AI Programme adopted the open-source Qwen architecture for its Southeast Asian language large model project.

GitHub Repositories

Alibaba maintains several public repositories for the Qwen model family:

Apple Intelligence Partnership

In February 2025, Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai confirmed at the World Governments Summit in Dubai that Alibaba would partner with Apple to provide AI features for iPhone users in China.^[10] Apple had been unable to roll out its Apple Intelligence features in China due to the country's stringent regulations requiring large language models to receive government approval before commercial deployment.^[10]

Apple evaluated models from several Chinese companies, including ByteDance, Tencent, and DeepSeek, before selecting Alibaba's Qwen.^[10] The partnership was driven by Qwen's advanced capabilities, its proven integration potential, and DeepSeek's relative lack of the manpower and experience needed to support a large customer like Apple. The deal was considered strategically significant for both companies: Apple needed a local AI partner to boost iPhone sales in China (the world's largest smartphone market), while Alibaba gained validation of its AI capabilities from one of the world's most valuable technology companies.^[10]

Competition

Tongyi Qianwen operates in one of the most competitive AI markets in the world. China's AI chatbot landscape includes major players from nearly every large technology company in the country.

Key Competitors

Market Dynamics

The Chinese AI chatbot market has seen rapid shifts in user adoption. ByteDance's Doubao emerged as a consumer market leader in late 2024, benefiting from integration with Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) and an aggressive pricing strategy.^[15] In early February 2026, a few months after its relaunch under the Qwen name and just after its Lunar New Year promotion began, Alibaba's Qwen app passed 73.52 million daily active users on February 7, according to QuestMobile data, and ranked first on the App Store free chart for six consecutive days.^[21] TechNode reported the figure as roughly 940% above the previous period.^[11] Alibaba said more than 130 million people used the app to shop with AI for the first time during the campaign, and that over the holiday users placed nearly 200 million "one-sentence" orders, with more than 4 million users over the age of 60 having the app place orders for them.^[42][43]

Baidu's ERNIE Bot, which had been an early mover in the market, saw declining downloads through 2024 as competition intensified.^[15] In response, Baidu made ERNIE Bot freely accessible to all users in early 2025.

Alibaba differentiates itself through its dual strategy of maintaining competitive proprietary models while simultaneously leading in open-source model releases, its deep integration across the Alibaba business ecosystem, and the Bailian platform that serves enterprise customers.

Usage and marketing

Unless marked as Alibaba's own statements, the figures in this section are third-party estimates from QuestMobile, a Chinese mobile-internet data firm, drawn from its 2026 reports; the most recent, on AI users and marketing, was published on 13 October 2026.^[32] QuestMobile's "AI-native app" figures count standalone apps only, not AI features inside other apps, and its advertising figures are modeled estimates rather than disclosed budgets.

Launch growth (November 2025 to January 2026)

Alibaba said the relaunched Qwen app passed 10 million downloads in the first week of its public beta and climbed into the top three of Apple's App Store free chart in China.^[25] In January 2026 the company said the app had passed 100 million monthly active users within two months of its November 17 launch.^[28][29] In QuestMobile's August 2025 data, before the relaunch, only 1.1% of China's AI-native app users opened the Tongyi app in a given month.^[32]

Lunar New Year 2026 campaign

On February 2, 2026, Alibaba said it would spend 3 billion yuan (about $431 million) from February 6 to attract users to the Qwen app over the Lunar New Year holiday, three times the 1 billion yuan pledged by Tencent for its Yuanbao chatbot and six times the 500 million yuan pledged by Baidu.^[30] According to Yicai, new users received a 25-yuan coupon for milk tea or holiday purchases on Taobao Flash Sale, and Alibaba said it gave away more than one million milk tea coupons in under three hours.^[31] Heavy traffic caused localized outages on the first day, and Alibaba said it was "urgently adding resources"; a second wave from February 13 offered cash red envelopes of up to 2,888 yuan per user.^[31] Alibaba later said users placed nearly 200 million "one-sentence" orders through the app during the holiday.^[11]

QuestMobile's daily-user chart for January and February 2026 shows Qwen below 10 million for most of January, a peak of 73.52 million in early February after its free-order milk tea promotion began on February 6, and a second peak of 55.11 million in mid-February.^[32] The same chart covers the two rivals that ran holiday promotions:

The end-of-February values are read from QuestMobile's unlabeled curves, as also reported by analyst Poe Zhao of Hello China Tech.^[32][36] QuestMobile's own summary was that the red-envelope campaigns produced large short-term user gains but that apps differed in how many of those users stayed active afterward.^[32] Zhao noted that by the end of February Doubao's daily users were about 39 million above their January level and Qwen's about 25 million higher, while Yuanbao was close to its January level, and he cautioned that these are changes in daily counts rather than retention rates.^[36] QuestMobile's weekly media-ad estimates also show that spending alone did not decide the outcome: in the week of January 26 to February 1, Yuanbao's estimated spending was more than twice Qwen's.^[32]

Monthly and weekly users

In the first quarter of 2026 Qwen averaged 72.18 million downloads a month, up 954.3% from the previous quarter, and passed Doubao at the top of QuestMobile's download ranking.^[33] QuestMobile attributed the growth to a "transaction loop": spending the holiday budget on consumption subsidies such as free milk tea rather than only cash, backed by Taobao, Alipay and Fliggy services inside the app.^[33] Its first-half 2026 report put Qwen's year-on-year growth in monthly users at 5,792.9%.^[35]

Advertising share (June 2026)

QuestMobile tracks three apps it treats as typical AI advertisers: Qwen, Doubao and Yuanbao. Each share below is that app's portion of the three apps' combined estimated spending. "Influencer" (soft-ad) spending covers sponsored content on Douyin, Kuaishou and Xiaohongshu.^[32]

Qwen also accounted for 95.9% of the three apps' hard-ad creative sets that month.^[32] June was the college-application season after China's national entrance exam: Qwen launched a college-application agent, Doubao opened an application-advice feature, and Yuanbao launched a tool with QQ Browser.^[32] QuestMobile characterized Qwen's approach as broad saturation across hard and soft ads and Doubao's as weighted toward soft "seeding" content.^[32] Zhao pointed out that these estimates do not cover all actual spending and that Doubao still had more than three times Qwen's weekly users despite its smaller share of tracked spending.^[36]

Reach and paying users (August 2026)

QuestMobile counted 537 million monthly users of AI-native apps in August 2026. Its "active penetration" measure is the share of those users who opened a given app during the month.^[32]

QuestMobile's payment rate is the share of an app's monthly active users who made any payment inside the app during the month, so it is not a subscription conversion rate. Among heavy users (those whose time in AI-native apps is above average), Qwen's payment rate was 7.9%.^[32]

Organization and Leadership

The Qwen models were developed by Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group's central AI research institution; in June 2026 Alibaba merged its Tongyi large-model business unit into a new Token Foundry business unit.^[44] Tongyi Lab was established in 2023 by consolidating several AI teams from DAMO Academy, Alibaba's research division.

Key Figures

Zhou Jingren was CTO of Alibaba Cloud and head of Tongyi Lab. On June 8, 2026, Alibaba merged its Tongyi large-model business unit with its Future Life Lab to form a Token Foundry business unit reporting directly to CEO Eddie Wu, and named Zhou the group's chief scientist, leading a new Alibaba AI research institute.^[44] He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University, previously worked at Microsoft Research, and joined Alibaba in 2015. He served as Chief Scientist at Alibaba Cloud and Deputy Director of DAMO Academy before becoming CTO in 2022.

On March 3, 2026, Lin Junyang (Junyang Lin), a central technical leader of the Qwen team, said in a post on X that he was "stepping down," without explanation; several other team members also announced resignations.^[40][41] The next day Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu, chief people officer Jiang Fang and Zhou Jingren addressed Qwen staff at an emergency all-hands meeting, where management said Qwen was not being scaled back.^[41] According to 36Kr, Tongyi Lab was planning to divide Qwen along functional lines, including pre-training, post-training, visual understanding and image generation, and merge those units with other lab teams; Hao Zhou, who joined from Google DeepMind, reported directly to Zhou Jingren and was expected to lead post-training.^[41] On September 21, 2026, on the eve of the Yunqi (Apsara) Conference, Alibaba appointed Liu Dayiheng, a long-time Qwen pre-training lead who had joined Alibaba's DAMO Academy in 2021, as head of the Qwen large language model project, according to 36Kr.^[45]

2025 and 2026 Developments

Model Releases

The pace of model releases accelerated through 2025 and into 2026. Key milestones include:

• January 2025: Qwen2.5-Max launched, a MoE model trained on over 20 trillion tokens that outperformed GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3 on several benchmarks.
• March 2025: QwQ-32B open-sourced, achieving reasoning performance comparable to DeepSeek-R1.^[9]
• April 2025: Qwen3 released with eight model sizes, trained on 36 trillion tokens in 119 languages.^[7]
• July 2025: Qwen3-Coder released with 480B total parameters for agentic coding.^[16]
• September 2025: Qwen3-Max, Qwen3-Next, and Qwen3-Omni released. Singapore adopted Qwen architecture for national AI program.
• November 2025: Tongyi app relaunched as the Qwen app in public beta on November 17; Alibaba reported 10 million downloads in its first week.^[25][26]
• December 2025: Upgraded Qwen3-Omni-Flash model released. NeurIPS Best Paper Award won by Tongyi Qianwen team.^[18]
• January 2026: Qwen app connected to Taobao, Alipay, Fliggy and Amap for in-chat ordering and booking.^[28] Qwen3-Max-Thinking released; Qwen3-VL Embedding and Qwen3-VL Ranker models open-sourced. Qwen passed 700 million Hugging Face downloads, ranking first globally.^[22]
• February 2026: Qwen3.5 released with 397B-A17B flagship supporting 201 languages.^[12] 3 billion yuan Lunar New Year campaign for the Qwen app.^[30]
• March 2026: Brand unified under "Qwen"; "Tongyi Qianwen" name retired.^[11][27]
• June 2026: QuestMobile estimates Qwen at 167 million monthly users and 77.7% of the media ad spending of the three AI assistants it tracks.^[32][34]
• September-October 2026: Personal Agent plans announced at the Yunqi Conference; Qwen Go! described in reports on October 13.^[38][39]

Hardware Expansion

Alibaba gave its Qwen-branded AI glasses their global debut at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2026 in Barcelona. The line launched in two series, the premium S1 and the G1, with the G1 priced from 1,997 yuan after national consumer incentives and platform subsidies; pre-orders opened in China ahead of sales starting March 8, 2026.^[42] Alibaba said the glasses would integrate with the Qwen app, with agentic features such as ordering food delivery, booking hotels and hailing rides by voice rolling out in phases from late March.^[42]

Enterprise Growth

Alibaba Cloud reported that the daily model call volume on the Bailian platform increased 15-fold over the course of 2024-2025. In the first half of 2025, Alibaba Cloud held 35.8% of China's AI cloud market, maintaining its leading position with AI Cloud revenue reaching RMB 22.3 billion in the period.^[23]

Technical Specifications Summary

See Also

• Qwen
• Qwen 3
• Alibaba
• Alibaba Cloud
• Large Language Models
• ChatGPT
• DeepSeek
• Hugging Face
• Mixture of Experts
• Open-Source AI
• Qwen Go!

References

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2. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5"Alibaba unveils Tongyi Qianwen, its AI-powered answer to ChatGPT." CNN Business, April 11, 2023. cnn.com/...libaba-ai-chatbot-announcement-intl-hnk
3. ^1 ^2 ^3"Alibaba Cloud Launches Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 and Industry-specific Models." Alibaba Cloud Blog, October 31, 2023. alibabacloud.com/...nefits-of-generative-ai_600526
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44. ^1 ^2"阿里宣布合并通义大模型事业部和未来生活实验室，周靖人将担任首席科学家" (Alibaba merges Tongyi large-model unit and Future Life Lab; Zhou Jingren named chief scientist). IT Home, June 8, 2026. ithome.com/...538
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