Alibaba Qwen 3.5 Small Model Series
March 3, 2026Posted by Federico Ulfo
Introducing Qwen 3.5 Small Model Series: Qwen3.5-0.8B · Qwen3.5-2B · Qwen3.5-4B · Qwen3.5-9B.
These small models are built on the same Qwen3.5 foundation — native multimodal, improved architecture, scaled RL:
- 0.8B / 2B → tiny, fast, great for edge device
- 4B → a surprisingly strong multimodal base for lightweight agents
- 9B → compact, but already closing the gap with much larger models And yes — they're also releasing the Base models as well.
A day after the release, their main lead researcher Junyang Lin and 3 other researchers, unexpectedly stepped down. We suspect Alibaba will go into the closed model game.