Alibaba released Qwen3 with open weights: six dense models from 0.6B to 32B alongside two mixture-of-experts models (30B total with 3B active, and 235B with 22B active), trained on 36 trillion tokens — twice Qwen2.5. The models could switch between thinking and non-thinking modes, with gains claimed in reasoning, instruction following, tool use, and multilingual work. Three months after DeepSeek drew the world's attention, a second Chinese line arrived with a full range of sizes. Qwen went on to become the largest open-weight foundation by derivative models and downloads; in August 2026 it was reported to have passed 3 billion cumulative downloads on Hugging Face, ahead of both Meta and Google.