Alibaba’s small, open source Qwen3.5-9B beats OpenAI’s gpt-oss-120B and can run on standard laptops
FeaturedCarl Franzen March 2, 2026 Credit: VentureBeat made with Google Gemini 3 Pro ImageDespite political turmoil in the U.S. AI sector, in China, the AI advances are continuing apace without a hitch.Earlier today, e-commerce giant Alibaba’s Qwen Team of AI researchers, focused primarily on developing and releasing to the world a growing family of powerful and capable Qwen open source language and multimodal AI models, unveiled its newest batch, the Qwen3.5 Small Model Series, which consists of:Qwen3.5-0.8B & 2B: Two models, both ptimized for “tiny” and “fast” performance, intended for prototyping and deployment on edge devices where battery life is paramount.Qwen3.5-4B: A strong multimodal base for lightweight agents, natively supporting a 262,144 token context window.Qwen3.5-9B…
