Qwen vs. Vicuna

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

Released alongside Koala, Vicuna is one of many descendants of the Meta LLaMA model trained on dialogue data collected from the ShareGPT website. According to the authors, Vicuna achieves more than 90% of ChatGPT's quality in user preference tests, while vastly outperforming Alpaca. As of May 2023, Vicuna seems to be the heir apparent of the instruct-finetuned LLaMA model family, though it is also restricted from commercial use.

Initial release: 2023-03-30

Reference

https://vicuna.lmsys.org/

Further Reading

• https://lmsys.org/blog/2023-03-30-vicuna/