Qwen Chat

Qwen Chat is Alibaba's AI assistant, powered by its Qwen series of models. Alibaba describes it as free to use and open to all, and it runs on the web, on iOS and Android, and as desktop apps for macOS and Windows. The service is powered by Alibaba Cloud.

The official Qwen site lists the main features. Thinking mode works through harder reasoning and problem solving, and can draw on live web results. Search finds answers and sources across the web. Deep Research is an agent that runs many searches in sequence and writes a summary report, which Alibaba says turns hours of work into minutes. Web Dev builds a working webpage from a plain language description. Image Generation and Image Edit, built on the Qwen VLo model, can create pictures from scratch, change existing ones and transfer styles, and the chat also offers video generation and Artifacts.

Qwen is multimodal. Alibaba says it can read text, images, audio and video in the same conversation, for example pulling numbers out of a chart or the main points out of an audio clip.

For developers, Alibaba offers a separate Qwen API platform that uses a request format compatible with the OpenAI API, so existing OpenAI SDK code can often be pointed at Qwen by changing the base URL and key. API use is billed separately from the free chat app through Alibaba's cloud platforms.

Many Qwen models are also released with open weights, and those can be run on your own hardware. On intelsi.si we cover Qwen Chat as a hosted frontier assistant and compare it with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok. Running or fine tuning the open Qwen models is a separate subject. Alibaba's terms, privacy and usage policies are linked from the Qwen site, and you should review them before sharing sensitive data.