Qwen 2.5
Alibaba's Qwen 2.5 generation, released September 2024, was the first Chinese open-weight model family to exceed Llama 3.1 on most benchmarks at comparable size. The release covered seven sizes (0.5B → 72B) plus specialized variants for code (Coder) and math, all under Apache 2.0. By late 2024, Qwen 2.5 had overtaken Llama as the most-downloaded model family on Hugging Face globally.
How are Intelligence, Speed & Cost bucketed?
- Top 1%≤ 1%
- Top 5%≤ 5%
- Top 10%≤ 10%
- Good≤ 25%
- Medium≤ 50%
- Below avg> 50%
- Top 1%≥ 345 tok/s
- Top 5%≥ 237 tok/s
- Top 10%≥ 196 tok/s
- Good≥ 146 tok/s
- Medium≥ 90 tok/s
- Slow< 90 tok/s
- Freeopen weights · self-host
- Low< $1 / M out
- Moderate$1–5 / M out
- High≥ $5 / M out
Why it matters
Qwen 2.5 made it impossible for any serious enterprise procurement decision in 2025 to skip the open-Chinese-model option. Even US enterprises with concerns about Chinese-origin models routinely benchmark against Qwen 2.5 / 3 to negotiate better pricing from OpenAI / Anthropic. The market structural effect is large.
Core Capabilities
Context Window
Availability
Pricing Model
Capability / Performance
Where this model sits relative to the middle 60% of models in the tree. All scores are 0–10 (higher is better).
What it feels like
- First open-source model to top OpenCompass leaderboard — beat Llama 3.1 405B with 1/5 the parameters
- 72B-Instruct: 74.2 on coding, 77 on math — outscored Claude 3.5 Sonnet (72.1) and GPT-4o (70.6) at release
- MMLU 85+, HumanEval 85+, MATH 80+ — frontier-tier across the board for an open-weights model
- 100+ models across the family (sizes from 0.5B to 72B, plus VL/Audio/Coder variants) — full ecosystem
- Pre-training jumped from 7T to 18T tokens with heavy emphasis on knowledge / coding / math
- Apache-2.0 license + competitive quality made it the de-facto open-source default in late 2024
Best use cases
- Self-hosted production where Llama 3.1 405B is too big to serve
- Multilingual deployments (29 languages with strong coverage)
- Fine-tuning on private code or technical corpora
- Distillation into smaller production models (the 7B/14B variants are excellent students)
Tools to try
Not ideal for
- Frontier reasoning by mid-2025 — Qwen 3 / DeepSeek R1 / Claude 4 series have moved past it
- Vision tasks (use Qwen 2.5-VL) or audio (use Qwen 2.5-Audio)
- Workflows where Western-platform compliance is contractual
Model Evolution
qwen is Alibaba's language model family.