Chinese tech company Alibaba on Monday released Qwen3, a family of AI models that the company claims can match and, in some cases, outperform the best models available from Google and OpenAI. Most of the models are — or soon will be — available for download under an “open” license on AI dev platform Hugging Face and GitHub. They range in size from 0.6 billion parameters to 235 billion parameters. (Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters.) The rise of China-originated model series like Qwen have increased the pressure on American labs such as OpenAI to deliver more capable AI technologies. They’ve also led policymakers to implement restrictions aimed at limiting the ability of Chinese AI companies to obtain the chips necessary to train models. According to Alibaba, the Qwen3 models are “hybrid” models — they can take time to “reason” through complex problems, or answer simpler requests quickly. Reasoning enables the models to effectively fact-check themselves, similar to models like OpenAI’s o3, but at the cost of higher latency.

Full report : Alibaba debuts its Qwen3 family of open-weight “hybrid” AI reasoning models, including Qwen3-235B-A22B, with 235B total parameters and 22B activated parameters.