NLP Lineage

3 August 2026 · Open weights

Qwen3.8

Qwen3.8

Qwen Team

Date
3 August 2026
What the date marks
Model release
Kind
Model
Organisation
Alibaba
Access
Apache 2.0
Other dates
Flash-Next 2026-08-26
Threads
In the guided tour
Chapter 8. The weights get out
Learning phases
6. Local models and deployment

Too recent for its influence to be judged: no later milestone in the data descends from it yet. 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

Qwen3.5 and 3.6 had kept the family current through the first half of 2026.

The problem

Open releases now have to match a monthly closed-model cadence.

What it introduced

The latest Qwen generation, with a preview of the next architecture.

Why it matters

Qwen remains the most widely downloaded and fine-tuned open family.

What modern models inherit

An Apache-licensed open baseline that keeps pace.

What came next

The Qwen4 architecture previewed alongside it.

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

Qwen3.8 has 69 documented ancestors across 12 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 25 turning points among them.

Qwen3.8 has 69 documented ancestors across 12 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

Qwen3.8 has 75 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.

Qwen3.8 has 75 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 12 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

  1. 2026Qwen3.8This milestone.
  2. 2026Qwen3.5Qwen3.8 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  3. 2025Qwen3Qwen3.5 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  4. 2025DeepSeek-R1Qwen3 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  5. 2024DeepSeek-V3DeepSeek-R1 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  6. 2024o1 Turning pointDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  7. 2024Test-time computeDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  8. 2024Llama 3.1 405BDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  9. 2024Qwen2Qwen3 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  10. 2024GPT-4oDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  11. 2024DeepSeek-V2 / MLADeepSeek-V3 built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  12. 2024Llama 3Llama 3.1 405B built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  13. 2024GRPODeepSeek-R1 built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  14. 2024DeepSeekMoEDeepSeek-V3 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  15. 2024DeepSeek LLMGRPO built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  16. 2023GPT-4VGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  17. 2023Llama 2 Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  18. 2023Position interpolationLlama 3.1 405B was influenced by thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  19. 2023Process supervisionTest-time compute was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  20. 2023DPOLlama 3.1 405B built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  21. 2023Grouped-query attention Turning pointQwen2 built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  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. 2022Chinchilla Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by this
    Llama 3.1 405B was influenced by this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  26. 2022Self-consistencyTest-time compute built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  27. 2022InstructGPT Turning pointGRPO was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  28. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  29. 2021GopherChinchilla built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  30. 2021FLANInstructGPT was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  31. 2021RoPE Turning pointQwen2 built directly on thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  32. 2021Switch TransformerDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  33. 2020RLHF for summarisation Turning pointInstructGPT built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  34. 2020GShard Turning pointDeepSeekMoE built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  35. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointChain of thought was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  36. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-3 was influenced by this
    DeepSeek LLM built directly on this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  37. 2019Multi-query attentionGrouped-query attention built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  38. 2019T5 Turning pointSwitch Transformer built directly on this
    FLAN was influenced by this    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  39. 2019C4 Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  40. 2019RLHF for LMsRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  41. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  42. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  43. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  44. 2019Transformer-XLRoPE was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  45. 2018BERT Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  46. 2018SentencePieceT5 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  47. 2018GPT-1GPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  48. 2018ELMoBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  49. 2018ULMFiTBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  50. 2017Mixed precisionDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  51. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  52. 2017Transformer Turning pointRoPE built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  53. 2017RLHF originRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  54. 2017Sparse MoE Turning pointDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  55. 2016Layer normTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  56. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  57. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointGPT-1 was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  58. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  59. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  60. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  61. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  62. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  63. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  64. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  65. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  66. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  67. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  68. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on this
    Sparse MoE built directly on this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  69. 1991Mixture of expertsSparse MoE built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  70. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  1. 2026Qwen3.8This milestone.
  2. 2026Qwen3.5Qwen3.8 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  3. 2025Qwen3Qwen3.5 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  4. 2025DeepSeek-R1Qwen3 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  5. 2024DeepSeek-V3DeepSeek-R1 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  6. 2024o1 Turning pointDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  7. 2024Test-time computeDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  8. 2024Llama 3.1 405BDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  9. 2024Qwen2Qwen3 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  10. 2024GPT-4oDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  11. 2024DeepSeek-V2 / MLADeepSeek-V3 built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  12. 2024Llama 3Llama 3.1 405B built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  13. 2024GRPODeepSeek-R1 built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  14. 2024DeepSeekMoEDeepSeek-V3 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  15. 2024DeepSeek LLMGRPO built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  16. 2023GPT-4VGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  17. 2023Llama 2 Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  18. 2023Position interpolationLlama 3.1 405B was influenced by thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  19. 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
  20. 2023DPOLlama 3.1 405B built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  21. 2023Grouped-query attention Turning pointQwen2 built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  22. 2023Tree of thoughtsTest-time compute was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  23. 2023GPT-4 Turning pointGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  24. 2023LLaMA Turning pointLlama 2 built directly on this
    Position interpolation built directly on this    Chapter 8. The weights get out
  25. 2022GPT-3.5 Turning pointGPT-4 succeeded thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  26. 2022WhisperGPT-4o was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  27. 2022Chinchilla Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by this
    Llama 3.1 405B was influenced by this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  28. 2022STaRo1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)
    Test-time compute was influenced by this (indirect influence)    Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  29. 2022Self-consistencyTest-time compute built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  30. 2022InstructGPT Turning pointGRPO was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  31. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  32. 2021GopherChinchilla built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  33. 2021FLANInstructGPT was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  34. 2021RoPE Turning pointQwen2 built directly on thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  35. 2021CLIPGPT-4V was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  36. 2021Switch TransformerDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  37. 2020Vision TransformerCLIP built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  38. 2020RLHF for summarisation Turning pointInstructGPT built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  39. 2020GShard Turning pointDeepSeekMoE built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  40. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointChain of thought was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  41. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-3 was influenced by this
    DeepSeek LLM built directly on this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  42. 2019Multi-query attentionGrouped-query attention built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  43. 2019T5 Turning pointSwitch Transformer built directly on this
    FLAN was influenced by this    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  44. 2019C4 Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  45. 2019RLHF for LMsRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  46. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  47. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  48. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  49. 2019Transformer-XLRoPE was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  50. 2018BERT Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  51. 2018SentencePieceT5 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  52. 2018GPT-1GPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  53. 2018ELMoGPT-1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  54. 2018ULMFiTGPT-1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  55. 2017Mixed precisionDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  56. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  57. 2017Transformer Turning pointRoPE built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  58. 2017RLHF origino1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  59. 2017ConvS2STransformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  60. 2017Sparse MoE Turning pointDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  61. 2016Layer normTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  62. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  63. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointGPT-1 was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  64. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  65. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  66. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  67. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  68. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  69. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  70. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  71. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  72. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  73. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  74. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on this
    Sparse MoE built directly on this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  75. 1991Mixture of expertsSparse MoE built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  76. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability

After: what it led to

No documented descendants are recorded for Qwen3.8 without weak links.

No documented descendants are recorded for Qwen3.8 without weak links.

No recorded descendants are recorded for Qwen3.8.

No recorded descendants are recorded for Qwen3.8.

Direct links and their sources

Where it came from

Built directly on

What it led to

None recorded in the sources used.