Plain-English answers to questions about Qwen. Facts and limits checked in November 2026.
Alibaba's open-weight AI model family, used via apps, APIs and third-party platforms, with more than 4 billion cumulative downloads by November 2026.
Yes - the weights are downloadable, and Alibaba has made open releases central to its AI strategy.
The next major Qwen model, teased on 6 November 2026 with the phrase 'The becoming begins'. No model or repository had shipped at the time of writing.
Developers and companies globally; Apple's HALO research project ran Qwen on a humanoid robot and scored 91 percent on tasks in unseen homes.
Both are open-weight families from Chinese labs. DeepSeek emphasises reasoning and training efficiency; Qwen covers more sizes and use cases and leads downloads. Benchmark both on your own workload.
