New Qwen3.5 Models Spotted in Qwen Chat — Alibaba's Next LLM Release Imminent

Overview

The r/LocalLLaMA community lit up after users shared screenshots showing Qwen3.5 model names appearing in Alibaba's official Qwen chat interface. While no official announcement has been made, the appearance of the model name in the production UI is widely regarded as a strong signal of an imminent release.

The Qwen Series

Alibaba's Qwen model family has become one of the most influential open-source LLM lineups in the community. Qwen2.5 demonstrated strong performance across coding, math, and multilingual tasks. Qwen3 further pushed the envelope with improved reasoning capabilities and compute efficiency. The series is particularly popular among local AI enthusiasts due to its permissive licensing and broad hardware support.

What to Expect from Qwen3.5

Community speculation centers around improved reasoning, longer effective context windows, and potentially a new range of size variants optimized for local deployment. If Alibaba follows its previous release patterns, Qwen3.5 could include models ranging from sub-7B to 72B+ parameters.

Significance

A Qwen3.5 release would further intensify competition in the open-source LLM space, where Alibaba has consistently delivered models that challenge both proprietary and other open-weight alternatives. The community response reflects growing reliance on the Qwen series as a cornerstone of local AI deployments.