QwQ-32BOpen Weight

QwQ-32B, released March 6, 2025 under Apache 2.0, was Qwen's answer to the reasoning-model wave that DeepSeek-R1 had set off six weeks earlier. It followed QwQ-32B-Preview from November 2024, and where the preview was explicitly experimental, the March release was a finished reinforcement-learning-trained reasoning model with a 128K context window.

The pitch was compression rather than scale: Alibaba positioned a 32B dense model as competitive with DeepSeek-R1, a 671B mixture-of-experts model, on mathematics and coding evaluations. That mattered practically as much as competitively — a 32B model runs on a single high-end GPU, so it put a frontier-style reasoning model within reach of individuals rather than clusters. The approach was folded into the main line two months later when Qwen3 shipped with switchable thinking modes built in.