Alibaba prepares to release its new Qwen 3.5 model

Change is coming to the AI world. According to 36氪, Alibaba is preparing to release a new version of its Qwen foundation model, called Qwen 3.5. The evidence: a request to add Qwen 3.5 to the Transformers library has appeared on HuggingFace, the world's largest open-source AI community. The move points to an imminent release and has drawn strong interest across the industry.

So what is Qwen, and why does it matter? Qwen is a family of large language models (LLMs) developed by Alibaba Group. Like other LLMs, these models can generate text, translate between languages, write various kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way. They form the backbone of many modern AI applications, from chatbots to automated content-generation systems. The jump to version 3.5 signals significant improvements in performance, efficiency, and functionality.

According to available information, Qwen 3.5 uses a new hybrid attention architecture (mixed attention mechanism). This could make information processing more efficient and improve the quality of generated text. More interesting still, Qwen 3.5 is likely a VLM (Vision-Language Model) with native visual understanding. That means the model will be able to process images and video as well as text, opening up new possibilities for multimodal AI applications. Developers have also found that Alibaba plans to open-source at least two versions of Qwen 3.5: a 2-billion-parameter dense model and a 35B-A3B MoE (Mixture of Experts) model. Open-sourcing will let researchers and developers around the world study, adapt, and improve the model, helping push AI technology forward.

The release of Qwen 3.5 has serious implications for the AI industry. First, it strengthens Alibaba's position as one of the leaders in LLM development. Second, support for visual understanding opens new possibilities for AI applications that combine text and images. Third, open-sourcing the Qwen 3.5 models will help grow the AI community and speed up innovation in the field. For users, this means more powerful and versatile AI tools that can handle a wide range of tasks, from automated content creation to image and video analysis.

In short, the release of Qwen 3.5 is an important step forward for large language models. The new architecture, support for visual understanding, and open-source availability make the model a promising tool for researchers, developers, and users. Alibaba continues to show its commitment to AI innovation, and Qwen 3.5 is a clear example of that. Now it remains to wait for the official release and see how Qwen 3.5 performs in practice.