Comparing to Opus 4.5 instead of the current 4.6 and other last-gen models is clearly an attempt to deceive, which isn’t winning them any points either.

I think there is a moderately large market for models like this that aren’t quite SOTA level but can be served up much cheaper. I don’t know how successful they’ll be in the race to the bottom in this market niche, though. Most users of cheap API tokens are not loyal to any brand and will change providers overnight each time someone releases a slightly better model.

This field is going in a incredible pace, the providers release a new model every quarter or so. The amount of criticism is a bit overblown in my opinion. The benchmarks still look very good to me. I’ve used GLM-5 (latest is GLM-5.1) and Kimi K2.5, they are decent and gets the job done, so seeing how this model of Qwen performs compared to it is kinda impressive.

Also, why are so many pointing out the fact that this model is not open-weight as if this is their first time doing so. Qwen-3.5-plus, Qwen-3-Max is also closed source. This is not something new.

I think Qwen trying to catch up to the SOTA models is still healthy for us, the consumers. Sure, its sad news that this version is closed-weight, but I won’t downplay their progress.

I used the https://modelstudio.alibabacloud.com/ API to generate that one, which required signing up for an account and attaching PayPal billing - but it looks like OpenRouter are offering it for free right now so I could have used that: https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3.6-plus:free

I can remember how good Opus 4.5 was. If I'm considering using this, it's most informative to me to compare to the model it's closest to that I have familiarity with.

I'm obviously not switching to this if I want the best model. I'm switching if I'm hopeful that the smaller versions are close to it, or if I want to have more options for providers, or for any other reasons unrelated to getting the highest quality responses possible.

But there are open models that also score 23/25 including Qwen 3.5 27B.

First, try signing up for Z.ai's coding plan. I know how to but I bet you won't be able to.

The absolute disaster that is Z.ai's internet presence shows that these small labs have no ability to market themselves and drive direct sales.

For marketing, they lack capabilities, and releasing open models is the only way for them to remain in the conversation.

For sales, they rely on distribution via OpenRouter, OpenCode etc. Interest with their users is driven by open model performance.

Open sourcing for Chinese labs is not some large national scheme. It is their only way to commercialization.

This one seems weird

you get a generous token limit.

As always, we'll have to try and see how it performs in the real world but the open weight models of Qwen were pretty decent for some tasks so still excited to see what this brings.

Like Qwen local for it’s privacy, but I trust the privacy of Google/OpenAI/Anthropic more than alibaba.