The cloud division of Chinese tech giant Alibaba has unveiled a new open-source AI model, Qwen-3.5. This was reported by SCMP.
Two versions of the LLM are now available in the Qwen application, timed to coincide with the Lunar New Year.
The flagship model performs at the level of 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, allowing it to understand text, images, audio, and video within a single system.
The family utilizes 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 heavy workloads eight times better compared to its predecessor. It can autonomously perform actions in mobile and desktop applications.
"Designed for the era of agent-based AI, Qwen 3.5 helps developers and companies move faster and accomplish more with the same computational resources, setting a new standard for efficiency per unit of inference cost," the company said in a statement.
Qwen has gained widespread popularity due to the release of multiple versions tailored for various developer and business tasks. The LLM has established itself as the "standard for open models." In December, its downloads on Hugging Face surpassed the total downloads of all other major open solutions combined.
As a reminder, in January, Qwen-3 became the world's first AI model launched and operating in orbit.