Qwen
Alibaba's assistant and open model family, spanning text, image and video generation.
Qwen is Alibaba's model family and the assistant built on it. Its influence comes less from the chat product than from the open-weight releases: Qwen checkpoints became one of the most common starting points for fine-tuning, so a large amount of downstream tooling assumes them. That ecosystem feeds back into the hosted product, which now bundles task agents, research modes and image and video generation. It runs as two separate services — an international site and a mainland one — with the mainland product now branded Qianwen.
Best for
- General assistant work in Chinese and English
- Building on an open-weight model family
- Mixed text, image and video tasks
Key features
- Chat assistant with task, research and generation modes
- Open-weight models across several sizes
- Image and video generation alongside text
Why it matters
The open-weight releases made Qwen a default base model for fine-tuning, which gives the hosted assistant an ecosystem most rivals lack.
