Alibaba’s Qwen3 AI model coming this month, sources say, in bid to cement industry lead
The latest upgrade to the Qwen family of models will include a mixture-of-experts version and one with just 600 million parameters for mobile devices

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing unit of the Hangzhou-based tech giant, plans to launch its Qwen3 LLM this month, according to people familiar with the matter. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Alibaba has not given an official timeline for the release of the new model. The company did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
Alibaba’s push also comes amid intensifying competition among Big Tech firms as they race to develop and upgrade their own foundation models. While only a handful of companies can afford to develop in-house general-purpose LLMs, many smaller companies have shifted to focus on building specialised applications around publicly available models.