OpenLLaMA vs. Qwen

Overview

OpenLLaMA is an effort from OpenLM Research to offer a non-gated version of LLaMa that can be used both for research and commercial applications. As of June 2023, the model is still training, with 3B, 7B, and 13B parameter models available.

Initial release: 2023-04-28

Reference

https://github.com/openlm-research/open_llama

Further Reading

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35798888

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