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Qwen

83 summarised stories about Qwen, each linking back to the original source. Browse all topics →

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Sunday, 16 August 2026

Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things

Simon Willison’s Weblog 1 month ago 44 ● 2 sources

Qwen Research released Qwen 3.8 27B, and tests showed the model’s default “extra high” reasoning can consume the full context and cause very slow, off-target outputs. The author’s first attempt with the full 262,144 max context length took 21 minutes (22,276 reasoning tokens) while producing 3,223 output tokens. Running with reasoning lowered or context reduced changes results to be faster and more task-faithful, and the model’s vision and bounding-box output work well enough for offline tooling even if the default setting tends to overthink.

Alibaba AI models hit 3 billion downloads, passing Meta, Google

Fortune 30 ● 2 sources

Alibaba’s open-weight Qwen AI model family surpassed 3 billion downloads in the past six months, overtaking Meta and Google on Hugging Face’s reported figures. Qwen reached over 3 billion downloads while Google had 418 million and Meta had 227 million (as of the figures cited for 2026). The result is Alibaba becoming the top open-model influence measure, expanding its developer and derivative ecosystem and pushing US rivals to release more open models.

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