Chinese firm Alibaba's new small AI models under the Qwen 3.5 series, Qwen 3.5-0.8B, 2B, 4B and 9B, are outperforming large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini that are about 10x their size. The lightweight alternatives are built for developers who want multimodal capability and strong reasoning performance without running large systems. Billionaire Elon Musk called the chatbots "impressive".