Qwen (Alibaba)

Alibaba Group, the parent of the Qwen family, was founded in 1999 by 18 people led by Jack Ma, a former English teacher.^3, 4, 5

Its main operations are based in Hangzhou, China, and co-founder Eddie Wu has been chief executive since September 2023.^3, 4, 5

The Qwen team states that it aims at artificial general intelligence and now builds generalist language and multimodal models.¹⁰

Alibaba Cloud unveiled its large language model Tongyi Qianwen on 11 April 2023 and opened a beta for enterprise customers in China.²

Its first open-source models, Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat, followed in August 2023 on ModelScope and Hugging Face, and Qwen-72B and Qwen-1.8B arrived in December 2023.^11, 12

The Qwen2 series was released in June 2024, and about 100 Qwen2.5 open models followed in September 2024.¹¹

Qwen3, announced on 29 April 2025, put several models out as open weights, including six dense models under the Apache 2.0 license.^6, 7, 8

Alibaba launched the Qwen app, a personal AI assistant, in November 2025, and Qwen3.5 followed in February 2026, starting with an open-sourced model.^3, 5

As of October 2026 the Qwen team presents Qwen3.8 as its latest series, described as the first release of a Qwen-Max-class model in open form.^6, 7, 8

Larger Max models have otherwise been offered through Alibaba Cloud's API and Qwen Chat, and the API runs in several regions where the customer selects the data storage location.^{6, 7, 8, 9}