Qwen is Alibaba Cloud's model family. Qwen 2.5 (late 2024) and Qwen 3 (2025) shipped a wide range of sizes (0.5B to 72B+) under Apache 2.0, including specialty variants for code, math, and very-long-context. Qwen has been notably aggressive at the open-permissive end: full-precision weights, Apache 2.0 across most sizes, no field-of-use restrictions like Llama's MAU clause. Qwen matters because it has emerged as the most-downloaded open- weights family in 2025-2026, displacing Llama at the top of HuggingFace's monthly download counts in many months. The capability is competitive with Llama and Mistral peers at the same size class. Compared to siblings: Llama (similar size coverage but the Community License is restrictive), DeepSeek (MIT, frontier-class reasoning, similar open posture but smaller release cadence), Mistral (early Apache 2.0 then drift), OLMo (truly open including data, smaller capability ceiling). Qwen's distinctive angle is "Apache 2.0 across the family including the flagships, with strong math and code variants." Production-ready and widely deployed in 2026. Used as the base for many fine-tunes on HuggingFace; the long-context Qwen variants are popular for retrieval-heavy use. Strategic question: does Qwen's open posture survive future regulatory pressure on Chinese AI exports, and does the West's "do we trust models from a Chinese lab" debate affect adoption.
The Stack · Weights · Open source
Qwen (Alibaba)
Alibaba's aggressive open-weights series (Qwen 2.5 / 3); Apache 2.0 across most sizes; full-precision weights available.
Sources
- Qwen on GitHub (QwenLM) https://github.com/QwenLM
- Qwen2.5 Technical Report https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15115
- Qwen Models on HuggingFace https://huggingface.co/Qwen
- alibabagroup.com (audit-verified) https://www.alibabagroup.com/en-US/document-1773855135127044096
- alibabacloud.com (audit-verified) https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/alibaba-introduces-qwen3-setting-new-benchmark-in-open-source-ai-with-hybrid-reasoning_602192
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Other projects at the Weights layer
9 siblings · ordered open first
- Mistral / Mixtral Open source
French lab; older open releases under Apache 2.0; flagships increasingly API-only or under research-tier licenses.
- DeepSeek V3 / R1 Open source
Cost-quality reset; V3 papers documented architectural innovations (MoE, MLA, aux-loss-free MoE); R1 open reasoning model.
- OLMo (AI2) Open source
The only major model family meeting the strictest reading of OSAID: data (Dolma), training code, and weights all published.
- Phi (Microsoft) Open source
Small open models heavy on synthetic-data training; MIT license; cost-effective inference at edge sizes.
- Kimi (Moonshot AI) Open source
Chinese open-weights series; emphasis on long-context performance.
- GLM (Zhipu AI) Open source
Tsinghua-spinoff; ChatGLM and GLM-4 families; Apache 2.0 for major releases.
- Yi (01.AI) Open source
Kai-Fu Lee's Chinese open model family (Yi-34B etc.); Apache 2.0.
- Llama (Meta) Source available
Meta's open-weights family; dominant in usage; license carries a 700M-MAU clause and acceptable-use restrictions.
- Gemma (Google) Source available
Google's open-weights siblings to Gemini; source-available, not OSI-approved.