Alibaba launches open source Qwen3 model that surpasses OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Chinese e-commerce and web giant Alibaba’s Qwen team has officially launched a new series of open source AI large language multimodal models known as Qwen3 that appear to be among the state-of-the-art for open models, and approach performance of proprietary models from the likes of OpenAI and Google. The Qwen3 series features two “mixture-of-experts” models and six dense models for a total of eight (!) new models. The “mixture-of-experts” approach involves having several different specialty model types combined into one, with only those relevant models to the task at hand being activated when needed in the internal settings of the model (known as parameters). It was popularized by open source French AI startup Mistral. According to the team, the 235-billion parameter version of Qwen3 codenamed A22B outperforms DeepSeek’s open source R1 and OpenAI’s proprieta ... Read full article.