Qwen N1 AI glasses go on sale, Pro adds iris-scan payment
Alibaba's Qwen launched the N1 and N1 Pro AI glasses plus a Bose-partnered earclip headset on Oct. 13. The Pro can verify payments by iris scan and track vital signs.
Qwen News and Analysis
39 verified stories covering Qwen, product updates and industry developments.
Cloudflare's Clef-omni Decision Model Now Handles Video and Audio
Cloudflare's new Clef-omni scores audio and full video input in a single pass: about 1.5 seconds for a 21-second clip, at $0.15 per million input tokens.
Microsoft's Decision-1 Is Built on Qwen 9B
Microsoft's new Decision-1 model for routing and classification is post-trained on Alibaba's open-source Qwen3.5-9B, priced at $0.042 per million input tokens with free output.
Baseten's AI Agent Writes an Inference Engine, Beats vLLM by 90%
Baseten had a Claude Code agent generate a custom inference engine for Qwen-3.6-35B-A3B, hitting 1792 TPS on B200 GPUs — about 90% faster than vLLM 0.25.1.
H Company Open-Sources Holo4, a 27B-Parameter Computer-Use Model
French AI startup H Company released Holo4 on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0, a computer-use agent model that operates desktops via screenshots, clicks and keystrokes.
Qwen Slashes Voice Model Prices by Up to 95%
Alibaba's Qwen released five Audio-3.1 voice models and cut TTS, realtime, and ASR pricing by up to 95%, challenging ElevenLabs on cost.
Qwen-Image-2.1 Goes Open, but Commercial Use Needs a License
Alibaba open-sources the image model Qwen-Image-2.1 with 7B parameters and native 2K output, but switches the license from Apache 2.0 to a research-only one, so commercial use now needs a separate agreement.
Alibaba's New Live-Translation Model Cuts Delay to 2.3 Seconds
Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate trims per-character latency from 2.8 to 2.3 seconds, understands 60 languages and speaks 29, with a demo page and API now live.
Federal Register Quietly Pulls Alibaba's Qwen-Powered Search
The US Federal Register quietly pulled an Alibaba Qwen-powered search feature this week, right as an FBI claim and a US-China summit both loom.
Anthropic: Alibaba Distilled Claude 151 Million Times in 3 Months
Anthropic's threat report says Alibaba ran 151 million Claude interactions over three months via 3,500 accounts to train Qwen models.
Qwen3.8-Max Takes Coding Crown at Quarter the Price of Rivals
Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max tops Code Arena's frontend coding leaderboard with a score of 1691, priced at roughly a quarter of the runner-up's rate.
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next Launches Tonight, Architecture Jumps Ahead to Qwen4
Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next launches tonight on the unreleased Qwen4 architecture, a multimodal MoE with under 5% parameter activation aimed at cutting inference cost.
Alibaba's Wan3.0 Debuts With 30-Second AI Video Generation
Alibaba's Wan3.0 video model went into open beta on August 24, extending single-clip length to 30 seconds and adding document-to-video input, with pricing that puts commercial output within reach.
Alibaba profit falls 76% as AI cloud logs 22-quarter high growth
Alibaba's Q1 FY2027 net profit fell 76% even as AI cloud revenue rose 45%, the fastest pace in 22 quarters, with data-center delivery time cut to 100 days.
Alibaba's Qwen-UI-Agent Trains on 100+ Real Devices
Alibaba's Qwen-UI-Agent is a real-device GUI agent trained on 100+ phones and 150+ apps, rivaling GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 4.8 on key benchmarks.
Alibaba opens Qwen Max-class weights
Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B has moved from a promise to an open-weight ModelScope repository, giving developers a 4.89TB Max-class model card to test.
Former Qwen lead bets on agents
Junyang Lin, former technical lead of Alibaba Qwen, has launched Pragmatik Labs in Shanghai with backing from Gaorong, HSG, Tencent and Shanghai Future Industry Fund, aiming at digital and physical agents.
Alibaba discounts its 2.4T Qwen preview first
Qwen3.8-Max-Preview arrives with 2.4T parameters, Qoder access and steep credit discounts before a full model card or independent benchmarks.
Qwen-AgentWorld trains agents with a language world model
Alibaba’s Qwen team introduced Qwen-AgentWorld, a language world model that predicts how environments respond to agent actions.
Alibaba puts Qwen into robots with a three-model suite
Qwen-Robot Suite is software rather than hardware: three models for navigation, manipulation and world prediction, designed to run on robots from AgileX, Franka, Universal Robots and Unitree.
Qwen veteran Lin Junyang raises at $2B valuation
The former Alibaba Qwen lead is building a new lab around world models and embodied AI instead of another chatbot.
Qwen robot models triple cross-body transfer success
Alibaba's Qwen team released three embodied AI models, with RobotManip lifting cross-robot transfer success from 7.5% to 23.9% while RobotNav and RobotWorld cover movement and prediction.
Alibaba’s Qwen3.7-Plus adds vision and agent loops
The multimodal version of Qwen3.7-Max can read images and video, but Alibaba is emphasizing autonomous iteration, tool use and self-testing.
Alibaba pitches Qwen3.7-Plus as a self-checking agent model
Alibaba released Qwen3.7-Plus on June 2, highlighting multimodal input, tool use, code generation and autonomous testing as its next agent bet.
Alibaba's AI writes its own chip driver, achieving 10x speedup
Alibaba demonstrated its Qwen3.7-Max model autonomously writing kernel drivers for its new Zhenwu M890 chip, achieving a 10x performance boost in 35 hours.
Qwen turns Taobao into an agent-run shopping flow
Alibaba is wiring Qwen into Taobao and Tmall so the AI agent can search, compare, try on, pay and handle after-sales inside one shopping loop.
Qwen3.6-27B Open-Sourced: Beats 397B MoE on SWE-bench Pro
Alibaba's Qwen3.6-27B, a 27-billion-parameter open-source model, outperforms its 397-billion-parameter predecessor on agentic coding benchmarks, driven by a new Thinking Preservation feature.
Alibaba's 27B Model Matches Its Own 397B Flagship in Benchmarks
Qwen3.6-27B, a dense 27B-parameter model, outperforms the 397B MoE Qwen3.5 on coding benchmarks, thanks to architectural stability and a new Thinking Preservation mechanism. It runs on consumer hardware like a single RTX 4090.
Alibaba Qwen3.6-Max Tops 6 Benchmarks, Shifts to Proprietary
Alibaba released Qwen3.6-Max-Preview, its most powerful model yet, but kept the weights closed. It scored first in six benchmarks and second overall, signaling a strategic shift from open-source flagship to proprietary monetization.
Alibaba open-sources Qwen3.6-35B, achieving 73.4% on SWE-bench
Alibaba's Qwen team has released Qwen3.6-35B-A3B under Apache 2.0, a 35B-parameter MoE model that activates only 3B per token, scoring 73.4% on SWE-bench Verified and outperforming Google's Gemma 4-31B by 21 points.
Qwen Core Team Exodus: Alibaba AI in Turmoil as Lead Researcher and Key Members Resign
Hours after releasing the Qwen3.5 small model series, Alibaba's AI lab lost its chief AI researcher and several key team leads. The departures follow an internal restructuring that reportedly placed a Google Gemini recruit in charge of Qwen's technical direction.
Alibaba Launches Qwen3.5-Omni: Unified Text, Audio, Video Model with Voice Cloning
Alibaba's Qwen team has released Qwen3.5-Omni, its first true all-modal model that processes text, images, audio, and video within a single architecture, featuring real-time voice cloning and audio-video vibe coding.
Alibaba Launches Qwen3.6-Plus, Shifting to AI Execution Layer for Enterprise Agents
Alibaba releases Qwen3.6-Plus, a model optimized for enterprise AI agent scenarios with code-level engineering, visual-to-code capabilities, and long-horizon planning, prioritizing production-ready execution over general-purpose competition.
Alibaba's Qwen 3.6 Plus Supports 1M Context, Rivals Claude Opus in Agentic Coding
Alibaba Cloud's Qwen 3.6 Plus offers a 1M-token context window for repository-level code analysis, matches Claude Opus 4.5 on SWE-bench, and generates front-end code from UI screenshots.
Qwen3.5 supports 201 languages as Alibaba accelerates global push
Alibaba's Qwen3.5 open-weight model now covers 201 languages and dialects, introduces native multimodal processing, and signals a broader industry shift from chatbots to AI agents.
Qwen3-Max introduces hybrid reasoning mode, letting users choose whether to think
Alibaba's Qwen3-Max flagship model now supports both thinking and non-thinking modes within a single deployment, reducing costs for smaller teams while competing with DeepSeek R1 on math and code tasks.
DeepSeek V4 and Qwen 3.5 Open-Source Models Drive Down Prices
DeepSeek V4 and Qwen 3.5/3.6 are reshaping the AI market with massive context windows, native multimodality, and aggressive pricing, pushing open-source models from a 1% to a 15% global share in one year.
DeepSeek V4 vs Qwen 3.5: Two Chinese Open-Source Models Battle for the Same Market
DeepSeek V4 and Qwen 3.5 (also labeled Qwen 3.6-Plus) are two Chinese open-source AI models competing on cost and capability, challenging expensive closed-source giants with trillion-parameter scale, massive context windows, and rock-bottom API pricing.
Alibaba open-sources Qwen3 under Apache license
Alibaba has released the full Qwen3 model series under the Apache 2.0 license, covering eight sizes from 0.6B to 235B parameters, all free for commercial use.