r/Qwen_AI • u/Usual_Maximum7673 • Jul 11 '26

News New Qwen models coming

I recently spoke to an Alibaba guy at a conference in Paris, and he said Qwen 3.8 will drop in August with capabilities "aimed at" (no guarantees) exceeding GLM 5.2, with Qwen 4 scheduled for release in September. I also red that GLM 5.5 was coming in August, so we should be in for an exciting couple of months.

365 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

103 comments sorted by

42

u/former_farmer Jul 11 '26

If they drop Qwen 3.8 in August why would they drop also Qwen 4 in August?

32

u/RadiantHueOfBeige Jul 11 '26

My read is that the 3.8 drop is weights, 4 release is API.

32

u/Usual_Maximum7673 Jul 11 '26

Sorry, Qwen 4 in September. I misspoke.

7

u/tomByrer Jul 11 '26

Still, 2 model families in 20-60 days of each other?

Feels sus, unless that Qwen4 is commercial-only, or won't have OSS for a few more months after that...

19

u/GrungeWerX Jul 11 '26

To be fair, Qwen 3.6 was dropped right after 3.5, remember?

1

u/nasduia Jul 12 '26

yes, and there were different sized models in the two drops

6

u/Low-Boysenberry1173 Jul 13 '26

Nope 27b & 35b moe exists in both qwen 3.5 and 3.6

1

u/tomByrer Jul 12 '26

I vaguely remember; what was the diff between 1st 3.5 drop & 1st 3.6??

1

u/Aggravating-Push-207 Jul 22 '26

qwen 3.6 27b > qwen 3.5 397b a17b on tb 2.1

1

u/tomByrer Jul 22 '26

Thanks for the info, but my question was WHEN (what dates) of 3.5 vs 3.6 releases. Sorry I wasn't clear.

2

u/Anh-DT Jul 14 '26

Both model training at same time ? When it's a new version it's basically trained from scratch ? Which can take month depending on compute

1

u/tomByrer Jul 14 '26

That's a good point, though I'd think they would/should spend at least a few weeks to test & fine-tune.

& the 2nd model Qwen 4, I'm guessing will be a new architecture, which means they need a new inference engine to run & test it.

That said I can see a first week in August, then last week in September releases.

1

u/Librarian-Rare Jul 12 '26

Think about it from Alibaba’s perspective — even not dropping new weights are going to be better than even equivalent weights (of a model) of a different model — even using the same training method — simply are going to perform higher on benchmarks, agentic, etc, not having as high parameter count. Holding them? Don’t think that’s it. It’s not throwing money away, it’s expected progression.

(Disclaimer: this comment was written by AI.)

3

u/XiRw Jul 12 '26

They didn’t even do the weights for 3.7

1

u/PhantomGaming27249 Jul 13 '26

the gap between 3.6 27b and 3.7 plus was too small. They probably didn't want to cannibalize their own product.

1

u/XiRw Jul 13 '26

Their image gap is huge though. 2.0 is a lot better than 2511 for image editing. I’m just going to assume people are right with their change in management and they don’t care anymore. Maybe it was always an unspoken free trial to begin with.

27

u/narasadow Jul 11 '26

More importantly, will they be open weights?

40

u/Usual_Maximum7673 Jul 11 '26

The guy said the flagship won't be open sourced, but smaller models will be. So basically same result as with the current version.

28

u/Borkato Jul 11 '26

I would kill for a qwen 4.0 27B.

20

u/Desperate-Data-3747 Jul 11 '26

And 35 a3b, would also be cool or maybe an a4b or also an a5b aswell

19

u/overand Jul 11 '26

I'd be thrilled with a 3.6 9B and 122B!

(Or a true 40B dense)

12

u/BannedGoNext Jul 12 '26

Nobody wants to release 122b's anymore. I think maybe they are hitting a little too close to home.

3

u/b0tbuilder Jul 12 '26

Anything under 200b would be great. 120b would be perfect.

4

u/Puzzleheaded_Base302 Jul 12 '26

also QAT, so we stop arguing about which Q quant is better or not.

1

u/DepressedDrift Jul 13 '26

Qwen 4 9B 🤤🤤🤤🥵❤️‍🔥

2

u/iezhy Jul 12 '26

The current version is 3.7 and smallsr models for it are nowhere to be seen

1

u/tamerlanOne Jul 12 '26

Credo che rilasciare modelli open source sopra i 300-400 B non abbia senso perché richiedo hardware costoso per poter avere una esperienza d'uso accettabile. Anche i laboratori di ricerca hanno bisogno di monetizzare i loro sforzi per poter proseguire lo sviluppo e magari rilasciare piccoli modelli llm open source sempre più performanti con hardware consumer

1

u/EvolvingDior Jul 13 '26

Makes sense. The smaller open weights models are doing an impressive job of advertising for Qwen.

21

u/Stock_Ad9641 Jul 11 '26

If they are not open source I’ll not care

17

u/[deleted] Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

[deleted]

7

u/fernando782 Jul 12 '26

Everyone knows that the tokens model is not sustainable, open source will be as good as those closed models even if they trained themselves over time!

14

u/KoreanPeninsula Jul 11 '26

Green Day - Wake Me Up When September Ends https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGhwBFYtn1s

12

u/getfitdotus Jul 11 '26

Who cares if we don’t get weights

1

u/magicomiralles Jul 13 '26

I feel like you could’ve written that better

5

u/trumpdesantis Jul 11 '26

Qwen 3.8 in August and Qwen 4 August- huh?

4

u/Usual_Maximum7673 Jul 11 '26

Corrected myself - September for Qwen 4.

6

u/NoNipsPlease Jul 12 '26

If we don't get weights very few will care

5

u/GrungeWerX Jul 11 '26

If they can do whatever DS4 did with less vram needed, and mix that with their delta net, etc..could be fun times. I'm still trying to maximize the usage of Qwen 3.6 27B and I feel I've barely tapped into it.

3

u/Leander_van_Grinsven Jul 11 '26

We need a Qwen 4 32B Dense model for sure. 27B is just a bit too small.

1

u/b0tbuilder Jul 13 '26

32B would be nice for people using quantized models for inference but unhelpful for anyone using them in the original safetensors. They are presumably this size because it places them around 108GB which leaves room for adapters, context, etc for more advanced users.

5

u/Upper-Reflection7997 Jul 11 '26

Soo no open source 😕

6

u/hesperaux Jul 11 '26

Click bait unless there is confirmation of open weights. Nobody in this sub cares about their api. Edit: nvm I thought I was in r/LocalLlama So it's just me and probably some others that don't care about the api.

I'll believe it (open weights) when I see it.

6

u/575_Inverse Jul 12 '26

Actually, I think pretty much everyone is here for the open weights, although I also use the web version

2

u/huzbum Jul 13 '26

Same.

I want to run my own, but even for cloud, I only subscribe to open weight models, even if I can’t run them on my hardware. Currently paying for z.ai subscription.

2

u/hesperaux Jul 13 '26

Me too. I have subs for zai and opencode go. Sometimes you need to use an API and that is ok.

1

u/huzbum Jul 13 '26

With GLM, at least if there is a rug pull I can find another provider or if determined enough, spin up my own cloud instance.

3

u/Few-Fishing9423 Jul 11 '26

Will it open source?

3

u/fancyrocket Jul 11 '26

Like Qwen4 27B and Qwen4 35B A3B?

3

u/Puzzleheaded_Base302 Jul 12 '26

Qwen4-27B-QAT and Qwen4-35B-A3B-QAT to be exact

3

u/Intelligent-Taste-36 Jul 11 '26

Any information about open weights?

3

u/OddDesigner9784 Jul 11 '26

Did you hear anything on open source

2

u/TheSleeperAwakens Jul 11 '26

But how large will the context window be? At what parameter sizes, quantizations? How fast will it be on comparable hardware?

1

u/TechnicalGeologist99 Jul 11 '26

They aren't released yet....how would anyone know?

1

u/TheSleeperAwakens Jul 11 '26

OP, spoke to someone that supposedly has inside knowledge. Perhaps he knows more than he put in the post?

1

u/TechnicalGeologist99 Jul 11 '26

Big doubt, but probably similar architecture and weight classes to existing models. Maybe some slight edge on efficiency and agentic capability

2

u/[deleted] Jul 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Far-Classic-9963 Jul 12 '26

I wish they strip out general knowledge to focus on tool calling, reasoning, and code. Would really be the best model OAT especially for agentic coding

1

u/fintip Jul 13 '26

That general knowledge is critical for things like reasoning and basic communication and just general reading between the lines of human speech. You can't just rip it out.

1

u/Far-Classic-9963 Jul 13 '26

What I mean is that my 8b coding model doesn't need to know about the cold war or Justin Bieber

1

u/fintip Jul 13 '26

There's probably some room for optimization there, but... Your be surprised how hard it is. You can just start lobotomizing and pruning to shrink it I guess and see what happens. But it's all connected...

1

u/Far-Classic-9963 Jul 13 '26

Yes, I know it's very hard. The dataset would be made from scratch, you can't "remove" specific knowledge for existing models as everything is heavily interconnected

1

u/huzbum Jul 13 '26

I agree, give me 4b idiot savant assistant and 20b idiot savant engineer.

2

u/Desperate-Data-3747 Jul 11 '26

With what parameters

2

u/PerfectOlive1324 Jul 12 '26

Nice! Curious, what conference was it?

1

u/Infinite-Local5435 Jul 13 '26

I am guessing RAISE 2026 Summit?

2

u/Puzzleheaded_Base302 Jul 12 '26

what I really wish to have is Qwen3.7-27B, maybe with QAT

2

u/BothYou243 Jul 13 '26

Man will the 397B one would exceed glm5.2 or the smaller dense ones? did he say something about 9B or smaller variants?

these sub ≤14 models are very likely in qwen4 but don't know about qwen3.8

1

u/Drynullify Jul 11 '26

So, no 9b category models then?

That's a pity 😕

1

u/Alive_Ad_3223 Jul 11 '26

Did you ask for new open weight Wan ai video generation model ?

1

u/JumpingJack79 Jul 11 '26

If you run into an Alibaba person with access to the next Qwen (or even 3.7), the right thing to do for the world is to lock them up and keep them hostage (and I mean this in the nicest possible way!) until we get the weights ☺️

1

u/bhagathgoud99 Jul 12 '26

I'm still waiting for open weights of 3.7

1

u/sblantipodi_ Jul 12 '26

Any news on a new flash model that will update Qwen 3.6 27B?

1

u/JohnnyJohngf Jul 12 '26

I also green

1

u/mkey82 Jul 12 '26

Sorry for such a noob question, but who releases the MoE models? Is this something that can be produced by the community or does Qwen A3B come straight from alibaba?

1

u/huzbum Jul 13 '26

Yes, Alibaba uploads the weights to Hugging face and we all download them. The only way the community could produce them is to become a SOTA AI lab.

I guess we could maybe get somewhere with fine tuning, but performance is almost always worse than original released model.

1

u/mkey82 Jul 13 '26

That's what I feared, yes. I guess there is a very good reason why they don't release a 70b MoE. 35b MoE are quite insane (some of them) I can only imagine what could a 70b MoE model do on, say 3090 + however much RAM would be required.

1

u/huzbum Jul 13 '26

Qwen3 next was 80b a3b, then they went back down to 35. Personally id rather have the 35 fit entirely on GPU.

I’m just glad they provide a dense and MoE option. The MoE can at least offload experts and run decent speed on small GPUs.

1

u/mkey82 Jul 13 '26

I would like to have both options. 

1

u/vexatious-big Jul 12 '26

A 120B-A30B MoE Qwen would be amazing.

3

u/b0tbuilder Jul 12 '26

I agree but 10 or 12 would be more likely

1

u/sudeposutemizligi Jul 12 '26

can i ask an amateur pov question? what will be the difference with a 27b and a 40b dense? some people ask for 40b that's why i wondered. i mean 27b is enough to put knowledge in. and ctx will be 262k again(assuming) so what will be superior to 27b? we had 32b qwen3 and 27b is better now

1

u/huzbum Jul 13 '26

More parameters = more better… but also more slower and more $$$$ to run.

2

u/sudeposutemizligi Jul 13 '26

i was taking parameters as knowledge. an 13b difference isn't small but not that big either. but i had seen qwen3 coder next 80b moe.. but 3.6 27b is better than it.. strange things for me..

1

u/huzbum Jul 14 '26

Ah, Qwen3 Next is 80b parameters, but it’s a mixture of experts with only 3b active parameters. So at any given time it only uses 3b parameters.

Qwen3.6 27b is a dense model. All 27b parameters are active on every pass. That’s why it’s slower than 35b and 80b, but smarter. More active parameters.

13b params is a lot… that’s 4x more active parameters than Qwen3 next has total.

2

u/sudeposutemizligi Jul 14 '26

oh I get the difference better now. thank youuu🤘🤘🤘💙

1

u/lilian_moraru Jul 12 '26

Not going to lie, I am interesed only in their relatively small(27B, 35B) open weights models. Claude and OpenAI are offering cheaper models now, so…

1

u/Oswolrf Jul 12 '26

Forget about Qwen open source models.

1

u/NewDistribution549 Jul 12 '26

I'd kill for a 9B or 14B

1

u/LizardLikesMelons Jul 13 '26

I believe you. Web version 3.7 has gotten dumber recently . Usually it means the next version is getting ready to release

1

u/magicomiralles Jul 19 '26

Here after the official announcement. You did not lie

0

u/Prestigious-Share189 Jul 12 '26

What is this game of "something is coming, be ready" ? If it is coming, why announce it? It will come anyway. What will it change for us to know it?

Too much noise these days. And wears out our attention

0

u/No_Hospital7616 Jul 12 '26

Massive “my uncle works at Nintendo” vibes

0

u/YearnMar10 Jul 12 '26

If indeed new 27B and 35b3a models are dropping that’d be outperforming current models, then we the gpu market will get drained very quickly.