The Chinese e-commerce giant first launched its Tongyi Qianwen, or Qwen, model last year. Since then, it has released improved versions and says that, to date, its open source models have been downloaded 40 million times.
The company also said that it upgraded its proprietary flagship model called Qwen-Max, which is not open-source. Instead, Alibaba sells its capabilites through its cloud computing products to businesses. Alibaba said that Qwen Max 2.5-Max surpassed rivals such as Meta's Llama and OpenAI's GPT4 in several areas inclduing reasoning and language comprehension.