Chinese tech company Alibaba on Monday released Qwen 3, 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

Qwen3 comes in two versions: a large LLM with the bulky name Qwen3-235B-A22B, which, according to Alibaba, should be able to keep up with models such as DeepSeek R1 o3-mini from OpenAI and Gemini 2.5 Pro in common benchmarks, and a small Qwen3-30B-A3B, which should nevertheless be extremely powerful.

Within the new Qwen3 series are two “mixture of experts” or MoE models that Alibaba says are able to compete with the most advanced reasoning models launched by Google and Anthropic PBC. Reasoning models are designed to mimic the way humans think about problems, taking more time to consider things and perform fact checking for accuracy.