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Alpaca vs. Qwen

LLM Comparison


Alpaca

Alpaca

Overview

Alpaca is an instruction-finetuned LLM based off of LLaMA.


The first of many instruct-finetuned versions of LLaMA, Alpaca is an instruction-following model introduced by Stanford researchers. Impressively, with only $600 of compute spend, the researchers demonstrated that on qualitative benchmarks Alpaca performed similarly to OpenAI's text-davinci-003, a significantly larger model.


Initial release: 2023-03-13

Further Reading

Qwen

Qwen

Overview

Qwen is Alibaba Cloud's family of large language models, including chat models, code models, and multimodal variants. Qwen 3 and QwQ are the latest releases, with strong reasoning capabilities.


Qwen (formerly Tongyi Qianwen) is a comprehensive family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud. The series includes base models, chat models, code-specific variants (CodeQwen), and multimodal models (Qwen-VL). Qwen models excel at multilingual tasks and have become particularly popular in Asia. The latest releases include Qwen 3 and QwQ (focused on reasoning), competing effectively with Western counterparts while offering strong Chinese language support.


Initial release: 2023-09-13

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Alpaca

Qwen

Products & Features
Instruct Models
Coding Capability
Customization
Finetuning
Open Source
License Noncommercial Custom
Model Sizes 7B 0.5B, 1.5B, 3B, 7B, 14B, 32B, 72B