The release comes just days after Baidu rolled out two advanced models, amid growing speculation about DeepSeek’s imminent R2 launch.
Alibaba Unveils Qwen3 AI Series with Enhanced Speed and Multilingual Features
On Tuesday, Alibaba Group Holding launched its highly anticipated third-generation open-source AI model series, Qwen3, boasting faster processing and improved multilingual capabilities. This release intensifies competition in China’s rapidly growing AI market.
The Qwen3 family includes eight models, scaling from 0.6 billion to 235 billion parameters, all featuring significant upgrades, according to Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen team.
In AI development, parameters measure the variables used in model training, serving as a key indicator of sophistication—higher parameter counts generally indicate greater capability.
Alibaba’s benchmark tests show that models like Qwen3-235B and Qwen3-4B match or surpass leading domestic and international competitors—including OpenAI’s o1, Google’s Gemini, and DeepSeek’s R1—in areas such as:
- ✔ Instruction following
- ✔ Coding assistance
- ✔ Text generation
- ✔ Mathematical reasoning
- ✔ Complex problem-solving
This release strengthens Alibaba’s position in the global AI race, challenging both Western and Chinese AI leaders.
Alibaba has launched Qwen3, reinforcing its position as a top open-source AI provider. With over 100,000 derivative models, Qwen is now the world’s largest open-source AI ecosystem, surpassing Meta’s Llama.
The Qwen team stated: “Qwen3 represents a major step toward AGI and ASI,” achieving higher intelligence through improved training. Trained on 36 trillion tokens covering 119 languages (triple Qwen2.5’s coverage), it offers better multilingual understanding.
Qwen3 is available on GitHub, Hugging Face, and ModelScope, and powers the Qwen chatbot. All models feature hybrid reasoning—”Thinking Mode” for complex tasks and “Direct Mode” for quick responses.
The launch follows Baidu’s new models and precedes DeepSeek’s expected R2 release, intensifying competition in China’s AI market. Alibaba is investing heavily, including a $52 billion AI infrastructure plan and AI-focused hiring.