QwQ 32B Preview

QwQ 32B: Alibaba’s Reasoning Breakthrough

QwQ (pronounced “ku-ku”, from “Qwen with Questions”) represents Alibaba’s entry into the reasoning model space. Like OpenAI’s o1, it explicitly shows its thinking process, making it powerful for complex problem-solving tasks.

The “Thinking” Paradigm

QwQ was designed to reason through problems step-by-step:

• Explicit Reasoning: Shows full chain-of-thought in responses
• Self-Questioning: Model asks itself clarifying questions
• Verification: Checks its own work during inference
• Extended Thinking: Allocates more tokens to harder problems

Benchmark Results

Strong performance on reasoning-heavy tasks:

• GPQA: 65.2% (graduate-level science)
• AIME 2024: 50.0% (math competition)
• MATH-500: 90.6% (mathematical reasoning)
• LiveCodeBench: 50.0% (coding challenges)

Preview Status

As a preview release, QwQ has known limitations:

• Language mixing in responses
• Occasional recursive reasoning loops
• May struggle with common sense tasks
• Better at STEM than general knowledge

Open Reasoning

Unlike proprietary reasoning models:

• Fully Open: Apache 2.0 licensed
• Transparent: Reasoning traces visible
• Self-Hostable: Run on your infrastructure

Best Use Cases

• Mathematical problem solving
• Complex coding challenges
• Scientific analysis and research
• Educational explanations requiring step-by-step reasoning
• Tasks where explainable AI is important
• Research into reasoning model architectures