Lab
Alibaba Qwen.
In plain English
Like Amazon, Alibaba is an online retail giant that also runs a big cloud business, and it's now putting AI at the centre of both, investing billions of dollars in it. Its AI comes as Qwen, a family of models in lots of sizes that you can use online or download, and one of the most popular families of downloadable models in the world. Qwen is built into Alibaba's cloud services and its online shopping business.
Models to know
Qwen3.8-Max at the top, Qwen Plus in the middle for long documents, and Qwen Flash for fast, high-volume jobs like FAQs and customer support chats. There are also specialist models: Qwen Coder for coding, Qwen VL for reading images, charts and complex documents, Qwen Image for making and editing images, and Qwen Omni and Qwen Audio for voice, audio and video.
Who's in charge
Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba Group.
Things to be aware of
Alibaba is very open about wanting to lead the race to AGI, and its CEO has even set out plans for going beyond it to superintelligence. The same model name can also mean the online version or the downloadable one, and they don't do the same things, so check which one a supplier means.