Alibaba's small, open source Qwen3.5-9B beats OpenAI's gpt-oss-120B and can run on standard laptops

Earlier today, e-commerce giant Alibaba's Qwen Team of AI researchers, focused primarily on developing and releasing to the world a growing family of powerful and capable Qwen open source language and multimodal AI models, unveiled its newest batch, the Qwen3.5 Small Model Series.

To put this into perspective, these models are on the order of the smallest general purpose models lately shipped by any lab around the world, comparable more to MIT offshoot LiquidAI's LFM2 series, which also have several hundred million or billion parameters, than the estimated trillion parameters (model settings) reportedly used for the flagship models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google's Gemini series.