Qwen vs. RedPajama-INCITE

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

Overview

RedPajama-INCITE is the first family of models trained on the RedPajama base dataset. The goal of the RedPajama-INCITE models is to replicate the LLaMA recipe but make the model fully open source under the Apache license. As of the initial release, the 3B parameter model is best-in-class, with the 7B parameter model in progress. Update as of June 6, 2023: the 7B parameter model was made available, outperforming other models of the same size.

Initial release: 2023-05-05

Reference

https://www.together.xyz/blog/redpajama-models-v1

Further Reading

• https://www.together.xyz/blog/redpajama-7b