Alibaba Cloud launched a beta version of Qwen in April 2023 under the name Tongyi Qianwen. The system opened for public use in September 2023 after receiving regulatory clearance from Chinese authorities.
The model architecture for Qwen was based on the Llama architecture developed by Meta AI, establishing a foundation for future iterations. This initial release marked the beginning of a rapid development cycle that would see multiple major updates within just two years.
Alibaba released more than 100 open weight models that had been downloaded over 40 million times by early 2025. Many Qwen variants distributed under Apache-2.0 licenses while others remained proprietary cloud offerings.
A blog post from the 29th of January 2025 claimed Qwen2.5-Max outperformed foundation models including DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B in key benchmarks. The company announced on the 26th of March 2025 that Qwen2.5-Omni-7B performed comparable to or better than Qwen3-32b while using less than 10% of its training cost measured in GPU hours.
Qwen3-Omni released on the 22nd of September 2025 processed mixed multimodal data including natural speech streaming responses. These systems combined vision transformers with language processing to handle complex visual tasks alongside standard text generation.