Alibaba has released its latest generation of open-source large language models, Qwen3, in what the company has described as a significant breakthrough in China's rapidly expanding artificial intelligence landscape.

The Chinese tech giant announced on Tuesday that the new Qwen3 series promises improved capabilities in reasoning, instruction following, tool usage and multilingual support across 119 languages and dialects.

Qwen3 marks Alibaba's first venture into "hybrid reasoning models," which combine traditional AI capabilities with what the company describes as "advanced, dynamic reasoning." These models can switch between a "thinking mode" for complex tasks and a "non-thinking mode" for faster, general-purpose responses.

"We have seamlessly integrated thinking and non-thinking modes, offering users the flexibility to control the thinking budget," the Qwen team wrote in a blog post. "This design enables users to configure task-specific budgets with greater ease."

The new series includes eight variations spanning different architectures and sizes, with the largest model—Qwen-3-235B-A22B—reportedly outperforming OpenAI's o3-mini and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro on certain benchmarks.

Wei Sun, principal analyst of artificial intelligence at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC that Qwen3 represents a "significant breakthrough—not just for its best-in-class performance" but also for several features that point to the "application potential of the models."

According to Alibaba, Qwen has already become one of the world's most widely adopted open-source AI model series, attracting over 300 million downloads worldwide and more than 100,000 derivative models on AI development platform Hugging Face.

The release comes amid intensifying competition in China's AI sector, particularly following the emergence of DeepSeek's R1 model earlier this year, which reportedly demonstrated high capabilities at significantly lower costs than Western counterparts.

Most of the Qwen3 models are already freely available for individual users on platforms like Hugging Face and GitHub, as well as through Alibaba Cloud's web interface. The company is also using Qwen3 to power its AI assistant, Quark.

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