Qwen3 Explained: 8 Open Models, 235B MoE, 119 Languages - Qwen Chat

This is a comparison the Qwen Team makes itself, so it should be read as a vendor claim rather than an independent benchmark.

The Qwen3 release bundles eight open-weight models built on two different architectures: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and dense.

All eight open-weight models are released under Apache 2.0. That means anyone can download the weights, fine-tune them, and deploy them commercially without a per-call licensing fee — a sharp contrast to closed, API-gated models where every request runs through the vendor’s servers. Qwen3-Max, covered further below, is the one exception in the line: it stays proprietary and API-only.

The models are distributed through Hugging Face, ModelScope, and GitHub. The Qwen organization on Hugging Face hosts the model cards and weight files for each size, and they’re commonly run through inference frameworks like vLLM, SGLang, Ollama, or llama.cpp once downloaded.