Alibaba Launches New Qwen Reasoning Model; To Release iOS and Android App for Qwen Chat

Chinese giant Alibaba on Tuesday launched QwQ-Max-Preview, a new reasoning model in the Qwen family of AI models. The model is built on the Qwen 2.5 Max and specialises in mathematics and coding-based tasks. 

“We’re happy to unveil QwQ-Max-Preview, the latest advancement in the Qwen series, designed to push the boundaries of deep reasoning and versatile problem-solving,” read the announcement. 

Further, the company has announced a ‘thinking’ feature in the Qwen Chat application that enables reasoning capabilities—‘backed’ by the QwQ-Max-Preview. 

The model is in its preview stage, and the company is expected to announce its full version soon. Furthermore, the QwQ-Max and the previously released Qwen 2.5 Max will soon be available as open-weight models. 

It was also announced that smaller variants of QwQ reasoning models will be open sourced for local device deployment. “Perfect for privacy-sensitive applications or low-latency workflows, they will empower creators to build custom AI solutions,” Alibaba said. 

Amusingly enough, the blog post officially making all the announcements was written by the QwQ-Max-Preview itself. It also details various reasoning and thinking steps.

It was also announced that Alibaba will release a dedicated app for iOS and Android users to access Qwen chat. 

On the LiveCodeBench leaderboard, a platform that evaluates LLMs for code, the QwQ-Max-Preview scored 65.6 points, higher than OpenAI’s o1 medium (63.4) and o3 Mini Low (60.9). 

That said, Qwen’s new model was announced around the same time as Anthropic’s new hybrid reasoning model. The company also announced the new Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which has an ‘extended thinking mode’ for reasoning-based tasks. 

On Monday, Alibaba announced that it plans to invest over $52 billion in the cloud computing and artificial intelligence sector over the next three years. This investment exceeds the company’s total AI and cloud spending in the past decade. 

During the earnings call, Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba Group, said, “We see AI as a once-in-a-generation industry transformation opportunity, and the primary goal of our AI strategy is to pursue the realisation of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and continuously push the boundaries of model intelligence capabilities.”