Qwen3 shows open models can still rival closed giants
Alibaba released Qwen3, a family of AI models that the company claims matches and sometimes outperforms Google and OpenAI’s best models, on Monday. The models range in size from 0.6 billion parameters to 235 billion parameters and are available for download under an “open” license from AI dev platform Hugging Face and GitHub.
The Qwen3 models are described as “hybrid” because they can take time to “reason” through complex problems or answer simpler requests quickly. This reasoning ability enables the models to fact-check themselves effectively, similar to OpenAI’s o3 model, but with higher latency. According to the Qwen team, they have “seamlessly integrated thinking and non-thinking modes, offering users the flexibility to control the thinking budget.”
Some Qwen3 models adopt a mixture of experts (MoE) architecture, which can be more computationally efficient for answering queries. MoE breaks down tasks into subtasks and delegates them to smaller, specialized “expert” models. The models support 119 languages and were trained on a dataset of nearly 36 trillion tokens, including textbooks, question-answer pairs, code snippets, and AI-generated data.
Benchmarks shared by Alibaba
Alibaba claims that Qwen3’s capabilities have greatly improved compared to its predecessor, Qwen2. The largest Qwen3 model, Qwen-3-235B-A22B, performs competitively on benchmark evaluations, beating OpenAI’s o3-mini and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro on Codeforces, a platform for programming contests. It also outperforms o3-mini on the latest version of AIME, a challenging math benchmark, and BFCL, a test for assessing a model’s ability to reason about problems.
Benchmarks shared by Alibaba
While Qwen-3-235B-A22B is not publicly available, the largest public Qwen3 model, Qwen3-32B, is still competitive with several proprietary and open AI models. Qwen3-32B surpasses OpenAI’s o1 model on several tests, including the coding benchmark LiveCodeBench. Alibaba says Qwen3 excels in tool-calling capabilities, following instructions, and copying specific data formats.
Tuhin Srivastava, co-founder and CEO of AI cloud host Baseten, noted that Qwen3 is another example of open models keeping pace with closed-source systems like OpenAI’s. He added that models like Qwen3 will likely be used domestically, despite U.S. restrictions on chip sales to China.
Qwen3 is available for download and through cloud providers, including Fireworks AI and Hyperbolic.