Alibaba just unveiled Qwen 3, its latest open-source large language model (LLM), and its flagship Qwen3-235B-A22B now rivals DeepSeek R1, Grok-3, and Gemini-2.5-Pro in benchmarks. With hybrid inference and enhanced Agent capabilities, Qwen 3 signals a shift — open source is China’s key to global AI dominance. The New Open-Source Power Duo: Qwen + DeepSeek For years, the open-source LLM ecosystem was ruled by Meta’s Llama and Mistral. But today, DeepSeek and Qwen are taking over.