The Chinese tech giant, Alibaba, has launched eight new open-weight AI models under the Qwen 3 series. New Qwen 3 models include two MoE (Mixture of Experts) models, such as Qwen3-235B-A22B and Qwen3-30B-A3B. Qwen3-235B-A22B is the largest and flagship model, with a total of 235 billion parameters, and 22 billion activated parameters.
Qwen3-30B-A3B is a smaller MoE model with a total of 30 billion parameters and 3 billion activated parameters. Apart from that, there are six dense models under the Qwen 3 series including Qwen3-32B, Qwen3-14B, Qwen3-8B, Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-1.7B, and Qwen3-0.6B.
All Qwen 3 models support Hybrid Thinking Modes, which means they are both reasoning AI models and traditional LLMs. In the Thinking mode, the model can reason step by step, and in the Non-Thinking mode, the model provides a quick response.
In addition, Qwen 3 models support over 119 languages and dialects from all around the world. It’s one of the most diverse multilingual models out there. Next, Alibaba has worked to improve MCP support for Qwen 3 models, unlocking agentic capabilities further.
As for performance, the largest Qwen3-235B-A22B model delivers competitive results along the lines of DeepSeek R1, Grok 3 Beta, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and OpenAI o1. What I find interesting is that the smaller Qwen3-30B-A3B model, with only 3 billion activated parameters, outperforms DeepSeek V3 and OpenAI’s GPT-4o model.
Alibaba says Qwen 3 models offer great performance in coding, math, science, and general capabilities. Overall, Qwen 3 represents a family of highly capable, frontier AI models from China. Now with the upcoming DeepSeek R2, China is well-positioned to rival Western AI labs.
