NLP Lineage

29 April 2025 · Reasoning

Qwen3

Qwen3

Qwen Team

Date
29 April 2025
What the date marks
Model release
Kind
Model
Organisation
Alibaba
Access
Apache 2.0
Other dates
arXiv 2025-05-14
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 2 of the 10 threads. How levels are decided

Read the primary source (arxiv.org)

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

What it changed

Before it

Open models shipped either as chat models or as separate reasoning variants.

The problem

Maintaining two lines doubles the work and confuses deployment.

What it introduced

One family from 0.6B to 235B with switchable thinking and non-thinking modes.

Why it matters

It brought the hybrid reasoning design to open weights across every size class.

What modern models inherit

Hybrid reasoning in models you can download.

What came next

Qwen3.5 and the 2026 releases.

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 has 67 documented ancestors across 12 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 25 turning points among them.

Qwen3 has 67 documented ancestors across 12 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

Qwen3 has 73 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 has 73 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 12 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

  1. 2025Qwen3This milestone.
  2. 2025DeepSeek-R1Qwen3 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  3. 2024DeepSeek-V3DeepSeek-R1 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  4. 2024o1 Turning pointDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  5. 2024Test-time computeDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  6. 2024Llama 3.1 405BDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  7. 2024Qwen2Qwen3 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  8. 2024GPT-4oDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  9. 2024DeepSeek-V2 / MLADeepSeek-V3 built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  10. 2024Llama 3Llama 3.1 405B built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  11. 2024GRPODeepSeek-R1 built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  12. 2024DeepSeekMoEDeepSeek-V3 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  13. 2024DeepSeek LLMGRPO built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  14. 2023GPT-4VGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  15. 2023Llama 2 Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  16. 2023Position interpolationLlama 3.1 405B was influenced by thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  17. 2023Process supervisionTest-time compute was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  18. 2023DPOLlama 3.1 405B built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  19. 2023Grouped-query attention Turning pointQwen2 built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  20. 2023GPT-4 Turning pointGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  21. 2023LLaMA Turning pointLlama 2 built directly on this
    Position interpolation built directly on this    Chapter 8. The weights get out
  22. 2022GPT-3.5 Turning pointGPT-4 succeeded thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  23. 2022Chinchilla Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by this
    Llama 3.1 405B was influenced by this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  24. 2022Self-consistencyTest-time compute built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  25. 2022InstructGPT Turning pointGRPO was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  26. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  27. 2021GopherChinchilla built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  28. 2021FLANInstructGPT was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  29. 2021RoPE Turning pointQwen2 built directly on thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  30. 2021Switch TransformerDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  31. 2020RLHF for summarisation Turning pointInstructGPT built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  32. 2020GShard Turning pointDeepSeekMoE built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  33. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointChain of thought was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  34. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-3 was influenced by this
    DeepSeek LLM built directly on this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  35. 2019Multi-query attentionGrouped-query attention built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  36. 2019T5 Turning pointSwitch Transformer built directly on this
    FLAN was influenced by this    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  37. 2019C4 Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  38. 2019RLHF for LMsRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  39. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  40. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  41. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  42. 2019Transformer-XLRoPE was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  43. 2018BERT Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  44. 2018SentencePieceT5 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  45. 2018GPT-1GPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  46. 2018ELMoBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  47. 2018ULMFiTBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  48. 2017Mixed precisionDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  49. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  50. 2017Transformer Turning pointRoPE built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  51. 2017RLHF originRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  52. 2017Sparse MoE Turning pointDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  53. 2016Layer normTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  54. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  55. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointGPT-1 was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  56. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  57. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  58. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  59. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  60. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  61. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  62. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  63. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  64. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  65. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  66. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on this
    Sparse MoE built directly on this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  67. 1991Mixture of expertsSparse MoE built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  68. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  1. 2025Qwen3This milestone.
  2. 2025DeepSeek-R1Qwen3 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  3. 2024DeepSeek-V3DeepSeek-R1 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  4. 2024o1 Turning pointDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  5. 2024Test-time computeDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  6. 2024Llama 3.1 405BDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  7. 2024Qwen2Qwen3 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  8. 2024GPT-4oDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  9. 2024DeepSeek-V2 / MLADeepSeek-V3 built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  10. 2024Llama 3Llama 3.1 405B built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  11. 2024GRPODeepSeek-R1 built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  12. 2024DeepSeekMoEDeepSeek-V3 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  13. 2024DeepSeek LLMGRPO built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  14. 2023GPT-4VGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  15. 2023Llama 2 Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  16. 2023Position interpolationLlama 3.1 405B was influenced by thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  17. 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
  18. 2023DPOLlama 3.1 405B built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  19. 2023Grouped-query attention Turning pointQwen2 built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  20. 2023Tree of thoughtsTest-time compute was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  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. 2022WhisperGPT-4o was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  25. 2022Chinchilla Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by this
    Llama 3.1 405B was influenced by this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  26. 2022STaRo1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)
    Test-time compute was influenced by this (indirect influence)    Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  27. 2022Self-consistencyTest-time compute built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  28. 2022InstructGPT Turning pointGRPO was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  29. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  30. 2021GopherChinchilla built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  31. 2021FLANInstructGPT was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  32. 2021RoPE Turning pointQwen2 built directly on thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  33. 2021CLIPGPT-4V was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  34. 2021Switch TransformerDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  35. 2020Vision TransformerCLIP built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  36. 2020RLHF for summarisation Turning pointInstructGPT built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  37. 2020GShard Turning pointDeepSeekMoE built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  38. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointChain of thought was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  39. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-3 was influenced by this
    DeepSeek LLM built directly on this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  40. 2019Multi-query attentionGrouped-query attention built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  41. 2019T5 Turning pointSwitch Transformer built directly on this
    FLAN was influenced by this    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  42. 2019C4 Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  43. 2019RLHF for LMsRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  44. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  45. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  46. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  47. 2019Transformer-XLRoPE was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  48. 2018BERT Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  49. 2018SentencePieceT5 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  50. 2018GPT-1GPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  51. 2018ELMoGPT-1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  52. 2018ULMFiTGPT-1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  53. 2017Mixed precisionDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  54. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  55. 2017Transformer Turning pointRoPE built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  56. 2017RLHF origino1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  57. 2017ConvS2STransformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  58. 2017Sparse MoE Turning pointDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  59. 2016Layer normTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  60. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  61. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointGPT-1 was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  62. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  63. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  64. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  65. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  66. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  67. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  68. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  69. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  70. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  71. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  72. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on this
    Sparse MoE built directly on this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  73. 1991Mixture of expertsSparse MoE built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  74. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability

After: what it led to

Qwen3 has 2 documented descendants across 1 chapter, reaching forward to Qwen3.8 in 2026. Showing its direct descendants.

Qwen3 has 2 documented descendants across 1 chapter, reaching forward to Qwen3.8 in 2026. Showing all of them.

Qwen3 has 2 recorded descendants, including indirect ones, across 1 chapter, reaching forward to Qwen3.8 in 2026. Showing its direct descendants.

Qwen3 has 2 recorded descendants, including indirect ones, across 1 chapter, reaching forward to Qwen3.8 in 2026. Showing all of them.

  1. 2025Qwen3This milestone.
  2. 2026Qwen3.5built directly on Qwen3Chapter 8. The weights get out
  3. 2026Qwen3.8built directly on Qwen3.5Chapter 8. The weights get out
  1. 2025Qwen3This milestone.
  2. 2026Qwen3.5built directly on Qwen3Chapter 8. The weights get out
  3. 2026Qwen3.8built directly on Qwen3.5Chapter 8. The weights get out

Direct links and their sources

Where it came from

Built directly on

Influenced by

What it led to

Built on directly by