# Tongyi Qianwen

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/tongyi_qianwen
> Updated: 2026-06-22
> Categories: Chinese AI, Conversational AI, Large Language Models
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), a free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Quote with attribution.

**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](/wiki/large_language_model) and conversational AI brand, launched by [Alibaba Cloud](/wiki/alibaba_cloud) on April 11, 2023 as China's answer to [ChatGPT](/wiki/chatgpt).[1][2] The name covers both Alibaba's consumer chatbot app and the [Qwen](/wiki/qwen) family of underlying models developed by the company's Tongyi Lab. On February 5, 2026, Alibaba retired the "Tongyi Qianwen" name and unified all of its AI products under the single brand "Qwen," renaming the consumer app to "Qwen APP" and the model series to the "Qwen Large Model."[11]

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. Following the 2026 rebrand to Qwen, the consumer app reached a peak of 73.52 million daily active users during the 2026 Spring Festival period, a roughly 940% jump, while the open-weight Qwen models surpassed 700 million cumulative downloads on [Hugging Face](/wiki/hugging_face), overtaking Meta's Llama as the most downloaded open model family in the world.[21][22]

## 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](/wiki/qwen) family of [large language models](/wiki/large_language_model) 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](/wiki/qwen) and [Qwen 3](/wiki/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](/wiki/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](/wiki/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]

### Why did Alibaba rename Tongyi Qianwen to Qwen?

On February 5, 2026, Alibaba Group announced a major brand integration plan, unifying all AI technologies and core brands under the single name "Qwen."[11] The consumer-facing chatbot application was renamed from "Tongyi Qianwen" to "Qwen APP," and the model series was rebranded as "Qwen Large Model." The Chinese brand name became "千问大模型" while the English brand became simply "Qwen." Tongyi Lab continues to exist as the organizational name of Alibaba Group's AI research and development institution. The rebranding aimed to reduce the market confusion that had resulted from maintaining multiple brand names (such as "Tongyi Qianwen" and "Tongyi Qwen") across different products.[11]

## 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](/wiki/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](/wiki/livecodebench), and BigCodeBench, with code generation capabilities comparable to [GPT-4o](/wiki/gpt4).[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](/wiki/mixtral) (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.

| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Text-to-Image | Generates images from Chinese and English text prompts |
| Style Transfer | Applies the visual style of one image to the content of another |
| Image-to-Image | Transforms an existing image into a new one with a similar style |
| Video Generation | Wanx 2.1 generates video from text prompts |
| Supported Styles | Watercolor, oil painting, Chinese ink, animation, sketch, 3D cartoon |

### 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](/wiki/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]

| Capability | Details |
|---|---|
| Transcription | Real-time audio-to-text with speaker identification |
| Summarization | Full-text summaries, per-speaker viewpoints, key point extraction |
| Chapter Division | Automatic segmentation of audio/video into chapters |
| Translation | Real-time bilingual subtitle translation |
| Action Items | Automatic extraction of to-do items and issues |
| Integration | DingTalk, standalone web and mobile apps |

## 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](/wiki/large_language_model).[20] The platform provides access to over 200 models, including the [Qwen](/wiki/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](/wiki/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](/wiki/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]

### 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](/wiki/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

| Version | Release Date | Key Details |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen (1.0) | August 2023 | Initial 7B parameter open-weight release; 72B and 1.8B released December 2023 |
| Qwen1.5 | February 2024 | Models from 0.5B to 110B parameters |
| [Qwen2](/wiki/qwen) | June 2024 | Major upgrade; released with open weights for smaller models, proprietary for largest |
| Qwen2.5 | September 2024 | Added 3B, 14B, and 32B sizes; trained on 18 trillion tokens |
| Qwen2.5-Max | January 2025 | MoE architecture; trained on over 20 trillion tokens; proprietary |
| Qwen2.5-VL | January 2025 | Vision-language models in 3B, 7B, 32B, and 72B variants |
| Qwen2.5-Omni | March 2025 | End-to-end multimodal model handling text, images, audio, and video |
| QwQ-32B | March 2025 | 32.5B parameter reasoning model; 131K context window |
| [Qwen3](/wiki/qwen_3) | April 2025 | Dense (0.6B to 32B) and MoE (30B-A3B, 235B-A22B) models; 119 languages; Apache 2.0 |
| Qwen3-Coder | July 2025 | 480B-A35B flagship coding model |
| Qwen3-Max | September 2025 | Proprietary top-tier model |
| Qwen3-Next | September 2025 | Open-weight release under Apache 2.0 |
| Qwen3-Omni | September 2025 | Open-source multimodal model generating text, images, audio, and video |
| Qwen3-Max-Thinking | January 2026 | Reasoning-enhanced proprietary model |
| Qwen3.5 | February 2026 | 397B-A17B MoE flagship; native vision-language; 201 languages; open-weights |

### Qwen3 Architecture

Released on April 28, 2025, the [Qwen3](/wiki/qwen_3) 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](/wiki/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](/wiki/reinforcement_learning) and structured self-questioning, showing performance comparable to [DeepSeek](/wiki/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](/wiki/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](/wiki/open_source_ai), 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](/wiki/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](/wiki/neurips) 2025 for their paper "[Attention](/wiki/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:

| Repository | Description |
|---|---|
| QwenLM/Qwen | Original Qwen (1.0) models and chat variants |
| QwenLM/Qwen2.5 | Qwen2.5 series models |
| QwenLM/Qwen3 | Qwen3 dense and MoE models |
| QwenLM/Qwen3.5 | Qwen3.5 native vision-language models |
| QwenLM/Qwen3-Coder | Specialized code generation models |
| QwenLM/Qwen3-VL | Multimodal vision-language models |
| QwenLM/QwQ | Reasoning model series |

## Apple Intelligence Partnership

In February 2025, Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai confirmed at the World Governments Summit in Dubai that Alibaba would partner with [Apple](/wiki/apple_intelligence) to provide AI features for iPhone users in China.[10] Apple had been unable to roll out its [Apple Intelligence](/wiki/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](/wiki/bytedance_ai), [Tencent](/wiki/tencent_ai), 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

| Competitor | Company | Notable Details |
|---|---|---|
| [Doubao](/wiki/bytedance_ai) | ByteDance | Leading in consumer market with integration into Douyin; aggressive pricing |
| [ERNIE Bot](/wiki/baidu_ai) | Baidu | Early mover in Chinese AI chatbots; ERNIE 4.5 Turbo released in 2025 |
| [Hunyuan](/wiki/tencent_ai) | Tencent | Integrated into WeChat and Tencent Cloud services |
| [DeepSeek](/wiki/deepseek) | High-Flyer | Open-source reasoning models; DeepSeek-R1 and V3 gained global attention |
| [ChatGLM](/wiki/zhipu_ai) | Zhipu AI | GLM series models; backed by Tsinghua University |
| [Kimi](/wiki/moonshot_ai) | Moonshot AI | Known for long context window capabilities |
| [SparkDesk](/wiki/iflytek) | iFlytek | Strong in speech recognition and education |

### 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] Following the Qwen brand unification in early 2026, Alibaba's Qwen APP saw daily active users reach 73.52 million during the Spring Festival holiday, an increase of roughly 940%, and ranked first on the App Store free chart for six consecutive days, processing nearly 200 million "one-sentence order" instructions.[21] More than 130 million people participated in Qwen's Spring Festival AI life-services campaign, including nearly 4 million users over the age of 60 trying AI-assisted ordering for the first time.[21]

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.

## Organization and Leadership

The Qwen models are developed by Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group's central AI research institution. Tongyi Lab was established in 2023 by consolidating several AI teams from DAMO Academy, Alibaba's research division.

### Key Figures

Zhou Jingren serves as CTO of Alibaba Cloud and head of Tongyi Lab. 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.

In early March 2026, Lin Junyang, the technical lead of the Qwen large-model team, stepped down from his role. Following his departure, Zhou Jingren assumed direct oversight of the Qwen model development. The organizational restructuring involved splitting the Qwen team from a vertically integrated structure into a horizontally organized system with separate teams for pre-training, post-training, text, multimodal, and other functions.

## 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](/wiki/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.
- **December 2025**: Upgraded Qwen3-Omni-Flash model released. NeurIPS Best Paper Award won by Tongyi Qianwen team.[18]
- **January 2026**: 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**: Brand unified under "Qwen"; Qwen3.5 released with 397B-A17B flagship supporting 201 languages.[11][12]

### Hardware Expansion

Alibaba announced its first AI glasses product under the "Qwen" brand, debuting at the 2026 Mobile World Congress (MWC) with pre-orders starting March 2, 2026. This marked Alibaba's entry into consumer AI hardware beyond software and cloud services.

### 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

| Specification | Details |
|---|---|
| Developer | Alibaba Cloud / Tongyi Lab |
| Initial Release | April 11, 2023 |
| Latest Model Generation | Qwen3.5 (February 2026) |
| Largest Open Model | Qwen3.5-397B-A17B (397B total, 17B active) |
| Largest Coding Model | Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B (480B total, 35B active) |
| Training Data (Qwen3) | 36 trillion tokens |
| Languages Supported (Qwen3.5) | 201 languages and dialects |
| License (Open Models) | Apache 2.0 |
| Open-Source Downloads | 700M+ on Hugging Face (January 2026); most downloaded globally |
| Platform | Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (Bailian) |
| Consumer App | Qwen APP (formerly Tongyi Qianwen) |
| Access | chat.qwen.ai, mobile apps, API |

## See Also

- [Qwen](/wiki/qwen)
- [Qwen 3](/wiki/qwen_3)
- [Alibaba](/wiki/alibaba)
- [Alibaba Cloud](/wiki/alibaba_cloud)
- [Large Language Models](/wiki/large_language_model)
- [ChatGPT](/wiki/chatgpt)
- [DeepSeek](/wiki/deepseek)
- [Hugging Face](/wiki/hugging_face)
- [Mixture of Experts](/wiki/mixtral)
- [Open-Source AI](/wiki/open_source_ai)

## References

1. "Alibaba to roll out its rival to ChatGPT across all its products." CNBC, April 11, 2023. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/11/alibaba-to-roll-out-its-rival-to-chatgpt-across-all-its-products.html
2. "Alibaba unveils Tongyi Qianwen, its AI-powered answer to ChatGPT." CNN Business, April 11, 2023. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/11/tech/china-alibaba-ai-chatbot-announcement-intl-hnk/
3. "Alibaba Cloud Launches Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 and Industry-specific Models." Alibaba Cloud Blog, October 31, 2023. https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/alibaba-cloud-launches-tongyi-qianwen-2-0-and-industry-specific-models-to-support-customers-reap-benefits-of-generative-ai_600526
4. "Alibaba Cloud Unveils AI Image Generation Model Tongyi Wanxiang." Alibaba Cloud Blog, July 2023. https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/alibaba-cloud-unveils-ai-image-generation-model-tongyi-wanxiang-to-help-businesses-to-unleash-creativity-and-productivity_600170
5. "Alibaba adds ChatGPT-style AI to meeting assistant app." South China Morning Post, June 2023. https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3222594/alibaba-adds-chatgpt-style-ai-meeting-assistant-app-wider-roll-out-plans-including-dingtalk
6. "Alibaba Integrates LLM Tongyi Qianwen into Taobao." Alizila, 2023. https://www.alizila.com/alibaba-integrates-llm-tongyi-qianwen-into-taobao-to-refine-e-commerce-searches-for-users/
7. "Qwen3 Technical Report." arXiv, May 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09388
8. "Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report." arXiv, March 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20215
9. "Alibaba shares jump on new open-source QwQ-32B reasoning model." SiliconANGLE, March 6, 2025. https://siliconangle.com/2025/03/06/alibaba-shares-jump-new-open-source-qwq-32b-reasoning-model/
10. "Apple will integrate Alibaba's AI into iPhones in China." CNBC, February 13, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/13/apple-will-integrate-alibabas-ai-into-iphones-in-china-chairman-joe-tsai-says.html
11. "Alibaba unifies large model brand under Qwen." TechNode, March 2, 2026. https://technode.com/2026/03/02/alibaba-unifies-ai-branding-under-qwen/
12. "Alibaba unveils Qwen3.5 as China's chatbot race shifts to AI agents." CNBC, February 17, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/17/china-alibaba-qwen-ai-agent-latest-model.html
13. "Alibaba's Open-Source AI Journey: Innovation, Collaboration, and Future Visions." Alizila, 2025. https://www.alizila.com/alibabas-open-source-ai-journey-innovation-collaboration-and-future-visions/
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