Alibaba’s Qwen AI model is the new crown jewel. The only problem is that they don’t make money from it.

Jack Ma he returned like a prodigal son to the international scene in February of last year. He did so at an event with the president of China, Xi Jinping, and that represented an important support for the technological leader. Since then his company, Alibaba, has not stopped flooding us with its open AI models, Qwen, but that strategy is having the same lights and shadows as its competitors. Devastates downloads. Alibaba launched its Qwen family of models in 2023 and released them with open weights almost immediately. That made them a perfect alternative to be able to use them locally and to also be able to tune them in all types of scenarios. In January 2026, Qwen was already the open AI model most downloaded in the world with close to a million daily downloads according to data from Hugging Face. By the end of 2025, Qwen was already the most downloaded open weight model in the world by far. Source: AI Base. But popularity does not equal income. In the first quarter of 2026, Alibaba indicated that it had obtained revenue of $1.3 billion related to AI, just 4% of its total revenue. The figure is very short, especially if we take into account that Alibaba plan to invest $55 billion in AI infrastructure by the end of 2027. Investors want profits now. Company shares have fallen 37% on the Hong Kong stock market this year: investors are clearly concerned about the lack of return on this bet on AI, something that we have also been seeing for some time in the US market. Internal divisions. The pressure to turn these open models into a business seems to be dividing Qwen’s own team. In March its chief engineer, Lin Junyang, announced his departure from the companyand he was followed by several key engineers amidst internal disagreements on how to monetize the model. The company has already started move token in the field of proprietary models: in April already released three of them in a few days. War with the US and Anthropic. Meanwhile, the company also faces external pressures. The Pentagon has included it on a blacklist of companies that Washington says support the Chinese military, something Alibaba denies. Additionally, Anthropic recently sent a letter to US senators accusing Alibaba of try to copy their technology using 24,000 fraudulent accounts. Alibaba has declined to comment on the matter. Alibaba has the same problem as OpenAI. Richard Lin, vice president of the company Datastrato, has been involved in the panorama of open AI models in China for some time, and his message reminds us of a palpable reality not only for that market, but for all startups and AI companies: “At the moment there are no AI companies with a sustainable business model. It is not a healthy industry.” The message is as true as it is forceful, but all AI companies would surely respond with what Zuckerberg said: “Losing a couple hundred billion dollars would be a bummer, but that’s better than being left behind in the race for superintelligence.” The funny thing is that they are both (probably) right. Image | qwen In Xataka | China’s open AIs aren’t “beating” ChatGPT, they’re doing something more important: catapulting their industry

What is and how to use Alibaba’s artificial intelligence without having to pay quotas

Let’s explain What is and how to use qwenthe artificial intelligence model created by Alibaba. It is a large language model that comes to compete against Deepseek in Asia, and also passing against other giants in the sector such as Chatgpt, COPILOT either Gemini. We are going to start this article explaining what exactly Qwen is and what are the peculiarities of this model. Then we will pass to Explain how you can start using itsomething quite simple. What is Qwen Qwen is a generative model of artificial intelligence. Specifically it is a Great linguistic model or Large Language Model (LLM), of the same type as Chatgpt and the rest of the alternatives. This AI model has been trained to understand natural language. This is A multimodal AIwhich means that it is able to process and generate both texts and images, code and other elements. Come on, although its main function is to respond by text, you will also be able to ask you to draw and do other tasks. Qwen is too An open source modelthat you can download from specialized pages such as Hugging Face and Modescope, or use in those programs to install models of Artificial Intelligence on your PC. You can use it for free For personal use or research, although its commercial use is limited with restrictions for large companies. This is an important point. Open source models expose their operation, and allow you to use all your functions free Without having to pay quotas. Not all Qwen models are like that, but if you enter its website you can use it for free without problems, and you don’t even need to create an account. Qwen’s first launch was in the beta phase in April 2023, with the name of Tongyi Qianwenwith an internal architecture based on the Meta de Meta ai model. It was publicly launched in September of that same year after receiving the approval of the Chinese government, and in December its first open source models were created. In mid -2024, QWen 2 arrived, also with several open source models, and since then it has been making periodic releases with new innovations, such as QWEN 2.5 in January 2025, and Qwen 3 at the end of April 2025. In this last launch, they claim to have overcome Depseek’s performance. How to use Qwen The easiest way to use Qwen is entering its official websitewhose address is chat.qwen.ai. Here, you will have the option of log in, create an account or continue delightedwhich means that you can use it without having to register anywhere. Of course, if you decide to use it withdrawn, every little you will jump the window to log in, something that can be annoying, but you can keep telling you that you use it if you count. There are some functions that cannot be used without registering, for example, You can’t create videos as a guestyou need to be using an account. On the main screen of Qwen you have a painting to write the text with what you want to ask artificial intelligence. Below are your specific functionsto make concrete requests such as generation and video, images, generate code, summaries, writing aids and more. In the same text box you have A button to activate online searchas well as to use deep thinking modes. On the left there is a + button to attach files and work from them, and the right you can use your voice to make requests. Above left on the web you can choose different models, although by default the most advanced will appear. All you have to do is write to Qwen the question you wantor choose one of its functions and ask you specific questions or requests. Then, the AI ​​will begin to generate the answers immediately. Its operation is the same as that of other models and other artificial intelligence websites. As we have told you, you can also activate a specific function as the creation of drawing. Then, in the prompt that you write to him you do not need or ask him to do that, since he will recognize the function. You ask for what you want and the AI ​​will generate it at the moment. In Xataka Basics | Prompts pages: 16 free websites and communities to find ideas for your prompts and find advice to improve them

Log In

Forgot password?

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.