OpenAssistant vs. Qwen

Overview

OpenAssistant is a project organized by LAION with aim of providing an open source alternative to ChatGPT. Its primary effort is to collected instruct examples to then tune existing LLMs. The first major release is available as part of Hugging Face's HuggingChat.

Initial release: 2023-04-15

Reference

https://open-assistant.io/

Further Reading

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddG2fM9i4Kk

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