Qwen, or Tongyi Qianwen, is a family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud, launched in April 2023 and designed to compete with leading global AI systems. What distinguishes Qwen is its open-weight philosophy, making advanced models freely available under the Apache 2.0 license for download, customization, and self-hosting, while also offering premium hosted versions through Alibaba Cloud. Qwen’s latest flagship Qwen3.5 and Qwen3-Max deliver multimodal capabilities, processing text, images, video, and audio simultaneously within a single system, along with native support for 201 languages and dialects. All models feature hybrid thinking modes allowing users to toggle between fast inference and deeper reasoning. Qwen is accessible through Qwen Chat at chat.qwen.ai for free conversational use, via API through Alibaba Cloud’s Model Studio with OpenAI-compatible endpoints, and as open-weight downloads for local deployment on any hardware from edge devices to enterprise servers. Users leverage Qwen for software development, scientific research, creative writing, multilingual translation, and enterprise automation, positioning it as a leading open-source alternative combining frontier performance with complete control and cost efficiency
Qwen resources
Here are various resources to learn more about how to use this tool, understand its capabilities better, and get ideas for different ways to use it
