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.

Alibaba unveils Qwen 3, a family of "hybrid" AI models. One of the largest model from the family beats leading models in benchmark tests.