Yet another player is claiming the top spot for AI. Alibaba, one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies, has announced the launch of its latest AI reasoning model, known as Qwen 3.
Alibaba claims these models match (and even outperform) models from both Google and OpenAI in reasoning tasks.
Qwen itself isn’t new (as the 3 in the name suggests), but this is the first time Alibaba has really tried to challenge the top dogs, as well as taking its first steps into more complex reasoning tasks.
Most of the models will soon be available for download under an open license from AI dev companies Hugging Face or GitHub. There will be a few models ranging in their parameters, going from 0.6 billion to 235 billion.
Introducing Qwen3! We release and open-weight Qwen3, our latest large language models, including 2 MoE models and 6 dense models, ranging from 0.6B to 235B. Our flagship model, Qwen3-235B-A22B, achieves competitive results in benchmark evaluations of coding, math, general… pic.twitter.com/JWZkJeHWhCApril 28, 2025
Parameters roughly translate to a model’s ability to problem solve in this instance. The more parameters, the better its ability, but also the longer it takes and the more it costs.
While they haven’t announced any further details, it is likely these models will eventually make their way over to the Qwen chatbot.
The models offer two modes. In thinking mode, the model will take time, going step by step to respond with the best answer. In non-thinking mode, the model provides quick responses to simpler questions where speed is more important than depth.
"This flexibility allows users to control how much 'thinking' the model performs based on the task at hand. For example, harder problems can be tackled with extended reasoning, while easier ones can be answered directly without delay,” said the Qwen team in a blog post.
“Crucially, the integration of these two modes greatly enhances the model’s ability to implement stable and efficient thinking budget control.”
Alongside DeepSeek, Alibaba is a sign that China is catching up with American AI companies. DeepSeek has already performed at the same level, if not better, than the likes of ChatGPT and Google on reasoning tasks.
If Alibaba’s claims are true, this is yet another set of reasoning models that can match ChatGPT’s performance. Interestingly, it would also be a more powerful, smarter model than what DeepSeek has created.
Like DeepSeek, Alibaba seems to undercut the US market, offering AI technology that is just as powerful but cheaper. This does, however, raise questions of ethics and security as several AI companies have been accused of cutting corners.
What is important about these models?
AI companies are moving to a slightly new system for AI models. Originally, there was just one version of an AI system, now there are multiple. These different systems are built to handle different tasks, putting in more effort for complicated tasks and using less energy for easy challenges.
ChatGPT, for example, has ChatGPT 4o, which is its general model for most tasks, but also 4o mini, for everyday simple requests. On top of that, it has a range of reasoning models.
Reasoning models are designed to take on complicated tasks. This is everything from coding to multi-step requests (asking it to do several things in a row) and dealing with deep research projects.
With this latest update from Qwen, Alibaba is aiming to do the same, offering a model that can do the simple everyday tasks, but also achieve the complicated thinking that is becoming expected of AI today.
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