Alibaba unveils Qwen3, a family of ‘hybrid’ AI reasoning models

Chinese tech company Alibaba on Monday released Qwen3, a family of AI models the company claims matches and in some cases outperforms the best models available from Google and OpenAI. Most of the models are — or soon will be — available for download under an “open” license from AI dev platform Hugging Face and GitHub. They range in size from 0.6 billion parameters to 235 billion parameters. Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters. The rise of China-originated model series like Qwen have increased the pressure on American labs such as OpenAI to deliver more capable AI technologies. They’ve also led policymakers to implement restrictions aimed at limiting the ability of Chinese AI companies to obtain the chips necessary to train models. According to Alibaba, Qwen3 models are “hybrid” models in the sense that they can take time and “reason” through complex problems or an ... Read full article.