Who's who in AIAI glossary
Qwen
Alibaba's open-source AI model family has become the most downloaded in the world, surpassing Meta's Llama, with nearly a billion cumulative downloads. Its open weights make it the favourite foundation for developers worldwide and a symbol of the rise of Chinese AI.
In other words
Over 200,000 derivative models have already been created from Qwen, a lineage that cannot be called back home.
Alyriaz articles that mention it
- A single model for text, image, sound and video
Alibaba has released Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash, a model that natively handles multiple modalities with a one-million-token context window. We explain what omnimodality actually changes.
- Qwen 3.8 in the 27-billion version: the open model that fits on a single card and sees images
Alibaba has released a 27-billion-parameter version of Qwen 3.8 under the Apache 2.0 licence, with built-in vision and a native context of 262,000 tokens. We explain why this size is the real point of interest.
- Gemma, Qwen: the wave of open models keeps rising
Google has announced a Gemma event for August 20, while Alibaba releases Qwen 3.8 weights. We take stock of the open ecosystem and what the community expects.
- Alibaba releases Qwen 3.8-Max, 2.4 trillion parameters, and promises to publish its weights
Alibaba launched Qwen 3.8-Max on 3 August 2026, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model aimed at code and collaborative work, with a weights release announced for the following week. We analyse what this release means in the race for openness.
- China switches off millions of virtual friends: on 15 July, AI companions disappear
On 15 July 2026, an unprecedented Chinese law comes into force, forcing ByteDance and Alibaba to shut down the emotional AI companions of Doubao and Qwen. Millions of users risk permanently losing agents built up over months. We break down this regulation, what it really targets, and the universal questions it raises.
- Stealing an AI without hacking anyone: the Alibaba case shaking up the AI world
Anthropic claims Alibaba used 25,000 fake accounts to query Claude nearly 29 million times and train its own Qwen model on the responses. Here's what distillation is, why it's nearly impossible to prevent, and why not everyone is convinced by the accusation.