Qwen

Qwen is a family of artificial intelligence models and an AI assistant platform developed by Alibaba Cloud. The Qwen ecosystem includes Qwen Studio for consumers, Qwen API for developers and businesses, Qwen Code for software development, and a broad collection of open-weight and hosted models. Qwen is designed for general-purpose AI tasks including conversation, reasoning, coding, research, writing, translation, multimodal understanding, image generation, video generation, and agentic workflows.

The Qwen project began with the release of Qwen-7B in August 2023, marking the start of its open-source/open-weight model development. Since then, Alibaba’s Qwen team has released successive generations including Qwen2, Qwen2.5, Qwen3, Qwen3.5, and newer Qwen3.6 and Qwen3.7 models. The project has expanded from a text-focused large language model family into a multimodal AI ecosystem capable of working with text, images, audio, and video.

Qwen Studio is the consumer-facing AI assistant. The official Qwen website describes it as free to use and designed for creativity, collaboration, research, and general AI assistance. It provides capabilities including web search, deep research, multimodal understanding, image generation, image editing, video generation, and other AI-powered workflows. Qwen can process different types of information together, allowing users to combine text, images, audio, and video in supported models.

Qwen has a strong focus on multimodal AI. Current Qwen models support combinations of text, image, audio, and video inputs, depending on the model. Qwen’s API platform currently lists models for text, image, video, audio, and multimodal processing, including models for image generation, text-to-speech, automatic speech recognition, and multimodal conversations.

Another important capability is AI-powered search and research. Qwen Studio provides web search for finding current information and sources, while its reasoning and research capabilities can help users investigate subjects, summarize information, and work through complex questions. The API platform also provides Web Search and Function Calling, allowing developers to give Qwen access to external information and tools.

Qwen is also heavily focused on coding and AI agents. Qwen Code is an open-source terminal-based AI coding agent optimized for Qwen models. It can help developers understand codebases, automate repetitive development work, and execute agentic coding workflows. Qwen Code supports OpenAI-, Anthropic-, and Gemini-compatible APIs and includes features such as Skills and SubAgents.

The Qwen ecosystem is also designed for developers who want to integrate AI into their own applications. The Qwen API uses an OpenAI-compatible API format, allowing developers familiar with OpenAI-style interfaces to build applications using Qwen models. Its API platform provides Chat Completions, Realtime API, and Batch API capabilities. Function calling can connect Qwen models to external tools, while the Realtime API supports low-latency multimodal experiences such as audio and video applications.

Open-weight availability is another major part of Qwen. Various Qwen models have been released through platforms including Hugging Face and ModelScope, allowing developers and researchers to download and deploy supported models. Qwen’s official materials also document compatibility with development and deployment frameworks such as Transformers, vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, Ollama, and LM Studio across different model generations.

Qwen has also expanded its language coverage significantly. Qwen3.5 increased language and dialect support from 119 to 201, providing broader multilingual coverage across its models. This makes Qwen suitable for multilingual conversations, translation, content creation, and international applications.

Overall, Qwen is best understood as a full AI ecosystem rather than a single chatbot. It combines consumer AI through Qwen Studio, developer APIs, open-weight models, coding agents, multimodal models, AI search, image and video generation, and tool-using agent capabilities. Its combination of hosted services and open-weight models makes it suitable for individual users, developers, researchers, and organizations building AI-powered applications.