Something is afoot in the land of Qwen

simonwillison.net

427 points by simonw 7 hours ago


sosodev - 6 hours ago

I really hope this doesn't hinder development too much. As Simon says, Qwen3.5 is very impressive.

I've been testing Qwen3.5-35B-A3B over the past couple of days and it's a very impressive model. It's the most capable agentic coding model I've tested at that size by far. I've had it writing Rust and Elixir via the Pi harness and found that it's very capable of handling well defined tasks with minimal steering from me. I tell it to write tests and it writes sane ones ensuring they pass without cheating. It handles the loop of responding to test and compiler errors while pushing towards its goal very well.

hintymad - 5 hours ago

There has been tension between Qwen's research team and Alibaba's product team, say the Qwen App. And recently, Alibaba tried to impose DAU as a KPI. It's understandable that a company like Alibaba would force a change of product strategy for any number of reasons. What puzzled me is why they would push out the key members of their research team. Didn't the industry have a shortage of model researchers and builders?

softwaredoug - 6 hours ago

I wonder how a US lab hasn't dumped truckloads of cash into various laps to ensure these researchers have a place at their lab