Alpaca vs. Qwen

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

Reference

https://crfm.stanford.edu/2023/03/13/alpaca.html

Further Reading

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

Reference

https://qwenlm.github.io/

Further Reading

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16609
• https://huggingface.co/Qwen