Qwen-7BOpen Weight

Qwen-7B, released August 3, 2023, was the first Qwen model Alibaba put on Hugging Face, and the point at which Tongyi Qianwen stopped being only a hosted chatbot. Alibaba had unveiled Tongyi Qianwen that April as an internal-facing product, but it could not be opened to the Chinese public until regulatory clearance came through in September. Publishing the 7B weights first turned a product announcement into something researchers outside Alibaba could actually build on.

The architecture drew heavily on Meta's Llama, and the release carried a bespoke Tongyi Qianwen licence rather than a standard open one — a pattern Qwen kept for its largest models for years afterward. A 14B model followed in September 2023, then Qwen-72B and Qwen-1.8B on November 30, 2023, which gave the family a genuine flagship and established the size-ladder strategy that every later generation repeated.