The second big open weight LLM release from China today – the first being DeepSeek v3-0324. Qwen’s previous vision model was Qwen2.5 VL, released in January in 3B, 7B and 72B sizes. Today’s Apache 2.0 licensed release is a 32B model, which is quickly becoming my personal favourite model size – large enough to have GPT-4-class capabilities, but small enough that on my 64GB Mac there’s still enough RAM for me to run other memory-hungry applications like Firefox and VS Code. Qwen claim that the new model (when compared to their previous 2.5 VL family) can “align more closely with human preferences”, is better at “mathematical reasoning” and provides “enhanced accuracy and detailed analysis in tasks such as image parsing, content recognition, and visual logic deduction”. They also offer some presumably carefully selected benchmark results showing it out-performing Gemma 3-27B, Mistral Small 3.1 24B and GPT-4o-0513 (there have been two more recent GPT-4o releases since that one, 2024-08-16 and 2024-11-20).

Full in-depth : Alibaba releases Qwen2.5-VL-32B, a 32B open model under Apache 2.0, claiming better math reasoning and alignment with human preferences than earlier 2.5 models.