Alibaba’s Cloud Division Launches Open-Source AI Model Qwen-3.5

Alibaba's cloud division unveils open-source AI model Qwen-3.5.

The cloud division of Chinese tech giant Alibaba has unveiled a new open-source AI model, Qwen-3.5, as reported by SCMP.

Two versions of the LLM are now available in the Qwen app. The release coincides with the Lunar New Year.

The flagship model demonstrates performance on par with leading advanced solutions and features a context window of 1 million tokens—one of the largest in the industry.

Qwen-3.5-Open-Source boasts 397 billion parameters and a context window of 256,000 tokens.

For the first time, Qwen has achieved native multimodality—it understands text, images, audio, and video within a single system.

The family employs a new architecture designed to enhance computational efficiency and reduce operational costs.

Alibaba stated that Qwen 3.5 is 60% cheaper to use and handles large workloads eight times better than its predecessor. It has gained the ability to autonomously perform actions in mobile and desktop applications.

“Created for the era of agentic AI, Qwen 3.5 helps developers and companies move faster and achieve more with the same computational resources, setting a new standard of efficiency per unit cost of inference,” the company stated.

Qwen has gained widespread popularity due to the release of several versions for different developer and business tasks. The LLM has established itself as the “standard open model.” In December, its downloads on Hugging Face surpassed the combined downloads of all other major open solutions.

Earlier in January, Qwen-3 became the world’s first AI model to be downloaded and operated in orbit.