NLP Lineage

16 February 2026 · Reasoning

Qwen3.5

Qwen3.5

Qwen Team

Date
16 February 2026
What the date marks
Model release
Kind
Model
Organisation
Alibaba
Access
Apache 2.0
Threads
In the guided tour
Chapter 8. The weights get out
Learning phases
6. Local models and deployment

A milestone: 1 later milestone descends directly from it, and its descendants reach 1 of the 10 threads. How levels are decided

Read the primary source (github.com)

Full summary in progress. Until then, this page shows the milestone's record from the research data.

What it changed

Before it

Qwen3 was the widely used open baseline.

The problem

Open models needed to keep pace with a frontier moving monthly.

What it introduced

A large sparse MoE release continuing the Apache-licensed family.

Why it matters

It kept a fully permissive open option close to the frontier.

What modern models inherit

A permissively licensed open baseline that tracks the frontier.

What came next

Qwen3.6 and 3.8 later in 2026.

Before and after

The milestones it descends from, and the milestones that descend from it. Work developed alongside it is not counted. Weak links are left out unless you include them.

Before: where it came from

Qwen3.5 has 68 documented ancestors across 12 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 25 turning points among them.

Qwen3.5 has 68 documented ancestors across 12 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

Qwen3.5 has 74 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 12 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 25 turning points among them.

Qwen3.5 has 74 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 12 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

  1. 2026Qwen3.5This milestone.
  2. 2025Qwen3Qwen3.5 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  3. 2025DeepSeek-R1Qwen3 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  4. 2024DeepSeek-V3DeepSeek-R1 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  5. 2024o1 Turning pointDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  6. 2024Test-time computeDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  7. 2024Llama 3.1 405BDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  8. 2024Qwen2Qwen3 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  9. 2024GPT-4oDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  10. 2024DeepSeek-V2 / MLADeepSeek-V3 built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  11. 2024Llama 3Llama 3.1 405B built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  12. 2024GRPODeepSeek-R1 built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  13. 2024DeepSeekMoEDeepSeek-V3 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  14. 2024DeepSeek LLMGRPO built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  15. 2023GPT-4VGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  16. 2023Llama 2 Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  17. 2023Position interpolationLlama 3.1 405B was influenced by thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  18. 2023Process supervisionTest-time compute was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  19. 2023DPOLlama 3.1 405B built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  20. 2023Grouped-query attention Turning pointQwen2 built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  21. 2023GPT-4 Turning pointGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  22. 2023LLaMA Turning pointLlama 2 built directly on this
    Position interpolation built directly on this    Chapter 8. The weights get out
  23. 2022GPT-3.5 Turning pointGPT-4 succeeded thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  24. 2022Chinchilla Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by this
    Llama 3.1 405B was influenced by this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  25. 2022Self-consistencyTest-time compute built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  26. 2022InstructGPT Turning pointGRPO was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  27. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  28. 2021GopherChinchilla built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  29. 2021FLANInstructGPT was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  30. 2021RoPE Turning pointQwen2 built directly on thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  31. 2021Switch TransformerDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  32. 2020RLHF for summarisation Turning pointInstructGPT built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  33. 2020GShard Turning pointDeepSeekMoE built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  34. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointChain of thought was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  35. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-3 was influenced by this
    DeepSeek LLM built directly on this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  36. 2019Multi-query attentionGrouped-query attention built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  37. 2019T5 Turning pointSwitch Transformer built directly on this
    FLAN was influenced by this    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  38. 2019C4 Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  39. 2019RLHF for LMsRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  40. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  41. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  42. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  43. 2019Transformer-XLRoPE was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  44. 2018BERT Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  45. 2018SentencePieceT5 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  46. 2018GPT-1GPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  47. 2018ELMoBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  48. 2018ULMFiTBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  49. 2017Mixed precisionDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  50. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  51. 2017Transformer Turning pointRoPE built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  52. 2017RLHF originRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  53. 2017Sparse MoE Turning pointDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  54. 2016Layer normTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  55. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  56. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointGPT-1 was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  57. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  58. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  59. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  60. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  61. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  62. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  63. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  64. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  65. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  66. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  67. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on this
    Sparse MoE built directly on this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  68. 1991Mixture of expertsSparse MoE built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  69. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  1. 2026Qwen3.5This milestone.
  2. 2025Qwen3Qwen3.5 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  3. 2025DeepSeek-R1Qwen3 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  4. 2024DeepSeek-V3DeepSeek-R1 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  5. 2024o1 Turning pointDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  6. 2024Test-time computeDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  7. 2024Llama 3.1 405BDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  8. 2024Qwen2Qwen3 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  9. 2024GPT-4oDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  10. 2024DeepSeek-V2 / MLADeepSeek-V3 built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  11. 2024Llama 3Llama 3.1 405B built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  12. 2024GRPODeepSeek-R1 built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  13. 2024DeepSeekMoEDeepSeek-V3 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  14. 2024DeepSeek LLMGRPO built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  15. 2023GPT-4VGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  16. 2023Llama 2 Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  17. 2023Position interpolationLlama 3.1 405B was influenced by thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  18. 2023Process supervisiono1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)
    GRPO was influenced by this (indirect influence)
    Test-time compute was influenced by this    Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  19. 2023DPOLlama 3.1 405B built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  20. 2023Grouped-query attention Turning pointQwen2 built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  21. 2023Tree of thoughtsTest-time compute was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  22. 2023GPT-4 Turning pointGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  23. 2023LLaMA Turning pointLlama 2 built directly on this
    Position interpolation built directly on this    Chapter 8. The weights get out
  24. 2022GPT-3.5 Turning pointGPT-4 succeeded thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  25. 2022WhisperGPT-4o was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  26. 2022Chinchilla Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by this
    Llama 3.1 405B was influenced by this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  27. 2022STaRo1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)
    Test-time compute was influenced by this (indirect influence)    Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  28. 2022Self-consistencyTest-time compute built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  29. 2022InstructGPT Turning pointGRPO was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  30. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  31. 2021GopherChinchilla built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  32. 2021FLANInstructGPT was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  33. 2021RoPE Turning pointQwen2 built directly on thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  34. 2021CLIPGPT-4V was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  35. 2021Switch TransformerDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  36. 2020Vision TransformerCLIP built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  37. 2020RLHF for summarisation Turning pointInstructGPT built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  38. 2020GShard Turning pointDeepSeekMoE built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  39. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointChain of thought was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  40. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-3 was influenced by this
    DeepSeek LLM built directly on this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  41. 2019Multi-query attentionGrouped-query attention built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  42. 2019T5 Turning pointSwitch Transformer built directly on this
    FLAN was influenced by this    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  43. 2019C4 Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  44. 2019RLHF for LMsRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  45. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  46. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  47. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  48. 2019Transformer-XLRoPE was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  49. 2018BERT Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  50. 2018SentencePieceT5 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  51. 2018GPT-1GPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  52. 2018ELMoGPT-1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  53. 2018ULMFiTGPT-1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  54. 2017Mixed precisionDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  55. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  56. 2017Transformer Turning pointRoPE built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  57. 2017RLHF origino1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  58. 2017ConvS2STransformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  59. 2017Sparse MoE Turning pointDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  60. 2016Layer normTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  61. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  62. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointGPT-1 was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  63. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  64. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  65. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  66. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  67. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  68. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  69. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  70. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  71. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  72. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  73. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on this
    Sparse MoE built directly on this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  74. 1991Mixture of expertsSparse MoE built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  75. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability

After: what it led to

Qwen3.5 has 1 documented descendants across 1 chapter, reaching forward to Qwen3.8 in 2026. Showing all of them.

Qwen3.5 has 1 documented descendants across 1 chapter, reaching forward to Qwen3.8 in 2026. Showing all of them.

Qwen3.5 has 1 recorded descendants, including indirect ones, across 1 chapter, reaching forward to Qwen3.8 in 2026. Showing all of them.

Qwen3.5 has 1 recorded descendants, including indirect ones, across 1 chapter, reaching forward to Qwen3.8 in 2026. Showing all of them.

  1. 2026Qwen3.5This milestone.
  2. 2026Qwen3.8built directly on Qwen3.5Chapter 8. The weights get out
  1. 2026Qwen3.5This milestone.
  2. 2026Qwen3.8built directly on Qwen3.5Chapter 8. The weights get out

Direct links and their sources

Where it came from

Built directly on

What it led to

Built on directly by