Qwen3-Coder-Next offers vibe coders a powerful open source, ultra-sparse model with 10x higher throughput for repo tasks
Carl Franzen February 3, 2026 VentureBeat made with GPT Image 1.5 on fal.aiChinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s Qwen team of AI researchers has emerged in the last year as one of the global leaders of open source AI development, releasing a host of powerful large language models and specialized multimodal models that approach, and in some cases, surpass the performance of the proprietary U.S. leaders such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI.Now the Qwen team is back again this week with a compelling release that matches the “vibe coding” frenzy that has arisen in recent months: Qwen3-Coder-Next, a specialized 80-billion-parameter model designed to deliver elite agentic performance within a lightweight active footprint. It’s been released on a permissive Apache 2.0 license, enabling…
