Alibaba picked the perfect moment to launch [Qwen 3.5](https://qwenlm.github.io/). Right before Chinese New Year, when every AI company in China is scrambling for attention, they dropped their next-gen open-source multimodal model — and then threw 3 billion yuan (roughly $420 million) in subsidies on top of it just to make sure nobody could look away.
The model itself comes in two sizes, a 9B and a 35B parameter version, both with native multimodal support. Alibaba says Qwen 3.5 is 60% cheaper than its predecessor and can handle workloads 8 times larger. Those are bold claims, but the benchmarks they’ve shared so far suggest it genuinely holds up against top-tier American models in coding, search, and agent tasks. You can dig into the models on [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen) or check out the repos on [GitHub](https://github.com/QwenLM).
What really caught my eye, though, is the “visual agent” feature. Qwen 3.5 can apparently look at your phone or desktop screen, understand what’s on it, and take actions — tapping buttons, filling out forms, navigating apps. It’s not just reading text from screenshots; it’s actually operating the GUI. That’s a meaningful step toward AI that doesn’t just answer questions but actually does things for you.
But honestly, the wildest part of this launch wasn’t the tech — it was the marketing. Alibaba offered free milk tea vouchers through the Qwen app, and within 9 hours, over 10 million orders poured in. Bubble tea shops across China [ran out of cups and ingredients](https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/3342702/alibabas-bubble-tea-giveaway-pushes-qwen-past-tencents-yuanbao-top-china-app-store). The app shot to #1 on China’s App Store. And then the servers crashed. The chatbot literally told users it didn’t have “physical hands and feet” and suggested they order on Meituan instead. You can’t make this stuff up.
The release has been covered heavily by [SCMP](https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3343738/alibaba-unveils-qwen-35-sharpening-global-race-spread-ai-models), [Pandaily](https://pandaily.com/alibaba-s-next-generation-open-source-model-qwen-3-5-comes-into-focus), and [Yahoo Finance](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alibaba-unveils-qwen3-5-model-090141322.html), and for good reason. Whether Qwen 3.5 actually lives up to the hype long-term remains to be seen, but as a launch? This one’s hard to top.
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