Qwen3
Alibaba opened a family of eight models from 0.6 to 235 billion parameters under an Apache licence, with switching between a fast answer and deliberation.
Why it matters
Open weights from China stopped being one laboratory's business: two independent companies did the same thing in a quarter.
The family spans from a model that runs on a phone to one competing with frontier closed models. As in Claude 3.7 the same season, deliberation here is a mode with a budget rather than a separate model. The Apache 2.0 licence carries no restriction by service size, unlike the Llama licence. Together with R1 this made China the main supplier of open weights, a position Meta had held until then.