4 ms·
Didn't Qwen stop releasing their more powerful models because they're commercializing them?
by strictnein 5mo ago
Didn't Qwen stop releasing their more powerful models because they're commercializing them?
- mswphd 5mo agoYes and no. Qwen 3.5 was released 3/2/2026. It includes models up to a 397B-A17B model https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen35 https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen35 A day afterwards, a high-up technical leader working on Qwen was let go https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/03/alibabas-qwen-tech-lead-steps-down-after-major-ai-push/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/03/alibabas-qwen-tech-lead-st... The more recent Qwen 3.6 was released on 4/16 https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen36 https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen36 This does not include any particularly large models. But the models it contains (Qwen3.6 27B and Qwen3.6 35B-A3B) are the local models people have been very excited about lately. So they didn't release any larger models, and the models people praise so much are from this most recent release.
- tyre 5mo agoIf they stop releasing their larger models because they want to monetize, would we expect them to release better small models that can outcompete those?
- mswphd 4mo agothere's pros and cons to it for them. Clearly, they get good branding (at least in enthusiast circles). Perhaps more important is they get community work on optimization. There have been significant performance uplifts on the Qwen3.6 models from the open-source community since they were launched (at a minimum, multi-token prediction is now working with them. It is almost a 2x token generation speedup) https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/comments/1ti9w4o/qwen3635ba3bmtp_on_an_rtx_3090_in_lm_studio_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/comments/1ti9w4o/qwen3635b...