Alibaba Qwen 3 — Hybrid Thinking, Apache 2.0, and the Best Open-Weight Model Family in 2025

Alibaba's Qwen 3 (April 28, 2025) redefined what open-weight AI can do: frontier-class performance, switchable 'thinking' mode, 100+ language support, Apache 2.0 license, and eight model sizes from 0.6B to 235B. We review the architecture, benchmarks, the Alibaba context, and how Qwen 3 stacks up against DeepSeek R1, GPT-4.1, and Claude 3.7.