Qwen
Alibaba's open-weight models for text, code and vision. Qwen is a family of language and multimodal models developed by Alibaba Cloud, with many sizes released as downloadable weights. The family includes general chat models, code-specialised models and vision-language models. Teams use Qwen for multilingual assistants, code generation, structured extraction and agents that call tools.
When it is the right choice
- You need strong multilingual support, including Asian languages
- You want a wide choice of model sizes to match your hardware budget
- You want a self-hosted code model for internal developer tools
- Not ideal if your organisation has policy restrictions on model origin; settle that before technical evaluation
How we use it
- Serve Qwen models with vLLM on GPU nodes, sized to the model and traffic
- Build evaluation sets from your real inputs and run them on every model change
- Use smaller Qwen models for automation steps where latency and cost matter most
- Review the licence of the specific Qwen release you plan to use
vLLM
Ollama
Hugging Face
NVIDIA GPUsRelated articles
From Idea to AI Feature in Six WeeksHow an AI project runs end to end in six weeks: discovery, design, prototype, infrastructure, rollout, then measuring and improving.
CI/CD for Models and PromptsEvaluation gates, model registries, canary releases and rollback: applying CI/CD discipline to prompts and models in LLM applications.
Fine-Tuning or Prompting? A Decision Guide for Small TeamsWhen prompting, RAG or fine-tuning is the right way to adapt a language model, and what each one costs a small engineering team.Qwen: frequently asked
Can Qwen be used commercially?
Many Qwen models are released under permissive licences, but terms have varied between releases and sizes. Check the licence on the model card for the exact model you deploy.
Does self-hosting Qwen send data to Alibaba?
No. When you run the weights on your own infrastructure, inference happens entirely there. Only the hosted API sends data to Alibaba Cloud.
Running Qwen, or deciding whether to? Tell us what you have; the first consultation is free.
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