Qwen

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Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) is Alibaba Cloud's ambitious project in the large language model (LLM) space, representing a whole family of models of various sizes and modalities. Designed for a wide range of natural language processing tasks and beyond, Qwen models are trained on massive datasets and show strong benchmark performance, especially in understanding and generating text in Chinese and English. Qwen models can engage in meaningful conversations, generate creative content (articles, stories), write and debug code in various programming languages, perform translations, summarize texts, and answer questions. A significant aspect is the release of open-source models, such as Qwen1.5 and Qwen2 (with sizes ranging from 0.5B to 72B parameters), which are available to researchers and developers for free use and fine-tuning under a license permitting commercial use (for models up to 72B). This fosters the democratization of access to powerful LLMs. Beyond text models, there is the multimodal version Qwen-VL, which can understand and interpret images alongside text. Alibaba Cloud also provides access to Qwen models via its Tongyi cloud platform and APIs, offering commercial solutions for enterprises. Qwen models feature large context windows (up to 32K tokens in some versions), enabling them to handle long documents and maintain more complex dialogues. Qwen is actively used for building chatbots, virtual assistants, developer tools, and other AI applications.