Qwen 3.5: Alibaba's Answer to GPT — Open Source in 201 Languages
If you're building anything bilingual in Hong Kong — and let's be honest, that's most things built here — Qwen 3.5 deserves your attention. Alibaba's model family now supports 201 languages, scales from tiny on-device models to a full 397B parameter MoE, and it's all Apache 2.0 licensed.
The Qwen Family
Alibaba hasn't released one model — they've released over 100 open-weight models under the Qwen umbrella. Qwen 3.5 is the latest generation, but the family spans:
- -Qwen 3.5 (397B MoE) — The flagship. Competes with Sonnet 4.5 on benchmarks.
- -Qwen 3.5 Medium — Smaller MoE for production use. Strong balance of quality and cost.
- -Qwen 2.5 series — Previous generation, still excellent. Available from 0.8B to 72B dense.
- -Qwen-VL — Vision-language models for image understanding.
- -Qwen-Audio — Audio understanding models.
All Apache 2.0. All on Hugging Face and ModelScope.
Why Qwen for Hong Kong
Bilingual by nature
Hong Kong operates in English and Chinese simultaneously. Emails in English. WhatsApp messages in Cantonese. Contracts in both. Product descriptions that need to feel natural in each language.
Most Western models handle Chinese as an afterthought. Qwen was trained on massive Chinese corpora alongside English and 199 other languages. The difference shows — particularly in code-switching (mixing languages mid-sentence, which is how Hong Kong actually communicates), understanding Cantonese colloquialisms, and producing natural traditional Chinese text.
201 languages
Hong Kong is international. Your users might speak English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog, Hindi, Indonesian, or Japanese. Qwen 3.5's 201-language support means one model handles your entire user base.
Size range
Need to run a model on a mobile app? Qwen has 0.8B and 2B variants. Need frontier quality for a complex backend? The 397B MoE is there. This flexibility means you can use the same model family across your entire product — from on-device inference to cloud-based processing.
Getting Started
Via Alibaba Cloud (DashScope API)
The managed option. Sign up for Alibaba Cloud, get a DashScope API key, and you're making API calls within minutes. Pricing is competitive with DeepSeek.
Via Hugging Face
Download the weights directly. Every Qwen model is available on Hugging Face. Use transformers, vLLM, or any standard inference framework.
Via chat.qwen.ai
For conversational use — Alibaba's ChatGPT-equivalent. Free to use, no account required.
Via Ollama
For local deployment. Pull Qwen models by name and run them on your machine. The smaller models (7B, 14B) run comfortably on a MacBook.
Qwen vs. DeepSeek: The HK Developer's Dilemma
The two models serve different needs:
Choose Qwen when:
- -Your application is bilingual or multilingual
- -You need strong Chinese language understanding
- -You want a range of model sizes for different deployment targets
- -You're building on Alibaba Cloud
Choose DeepSeek when:
- -You need strong reasoning capability
- -You want the simplest API experience
- -You're focused on English-language tasks
- -You want the MIT license (vs. Apache 2.0 — both are permissive, but MIT is slightly more so)
DeepSeek's strength is reasoning and chat; Qwen excels at anything touching Chinese language. For coding, consider MiniMax M2.5 or GLM-5 which score higher on SWE-bench.
The Apache 2.0 Advantage
Like DeepSeek's MIT license, Qwen's Apache 2.0 means full commercial freedom. But Apache 2.0 also includes an explicit patent grant — meaning Alibaba can't later claim patent infringement on your use of the model. For companies building serious products, that's a meaningful legal protection.
Sources
- -Qwen 3.5 Official Blog
- -Qwen3.5-397B-A17B — Hugging Face
- -Qwen3.5 — GitHub
- -Alibaba Unveils Qwen-3.5 — SCMP
- -Alibaba Unveils Qwen3.5 — CNBC
- -Qwen3.5 Small Models Beat GPT-OSS-120B — VentureBeat
Building bilingual products in Hong Kong? We'd love to hear which models you're using and why. Subscribe to the Hong Kong AI Podcast or reach out at contact@hongkongaipodcast.com.
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