This does not include any particularly large models. But the models it contains (Qwen3.6 27B and Qwen3.6 35B-A3B) are the local models people have been very excited about lately. So they didn't release any larger models, and the models people praise so much are from this most recent release.
If they stop releasing their larger models because they want to monetize, would we expect them to release better small models that can outcompete those?
there's pros and cons to it for them. Clearly, they get good branding (at least in enthusiast circles). Perhaps more important is they get community work on optimization. There have been significant performance uplifts on the Qwen3.6 models from the open-source community since they were launched (at a minimum, multi-token prediction is now working with them. It is almost a 2x token generation speedup)
Qwen 3.5 was released 3/2/2026. It includes models up to a 397B-A17B model
https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen35
A day afterwards, a high-up technical leader working on Qwen was let go
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/03/alibabas-qwen-tech-lead-st...
The more recent Qwen 3.6 was released on 4/16
https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen36
This does not include any particularly large models. But the models it contains (Qwen3.6 27B and Qwen3.6 35B-A3B) are the local models people have been very excited about lately. So they didn't release any larger models, and the models people praise so much are from this most recent release.