OPT vs. Qwen

Overview

Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models (OPT) is part of the family of open source models designed to replicate GPT-3, with similar decoder-only architecture. It has since been superseded by models such as LLaMA, GPT-J, and Pythia.

Initial release: 2022-05-03

Reference

https://github.com/facebookresearch/metaseq/tree/main/projects/OPT

Further Reading

Overview

Qwen is Alibaba's broad family of open and hosted models for reasoning, coding, multimodal understanding, and agents. Qwen 3.8 Max Preview is the current generation.

Qwen, formerly Tongyi Qianwen, is a family of language and multimodal models developed by Alibaba. It includes general-purpose, coding, vision-language, audio, embedding, and reasoning variants. Qwen 3.8 Max Preview is the current hosted flagship, with support for multimodal and agentic workflows. Earlier Qwen generations, including Qwen 3.6 checkpoints, remain available as Apache 2.0 open weights; availability and licensing should therefore be checked per model.

Initial release: 2023-09-13

Current generation: Qwen 3.8

Reference

https://qwen.ai/

Further Reading

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16609
• https://huggingface.co/Qwen
• https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-35b-a3b