According to an Apsara attendee: Alibaba Cloud CTO names Qwen4 release timeframe
At the Apsara conference in Amsterdam on October 29, 2026, the Alibaba Cloud CTO, according to an attendee, said that Qwen4 will be released next week. There is no official confirmation or details.
On October 29, 2026, at the Apsara conference (Alibaba Cloud's annual conference) in Amsterdam, the Alibaba Cloud CTO (chief technology officer) said that Qwen4 will be released next week. A conference attendee reported this in a Reddit post. The publication does not contain a link to an official press release, slides, or a recording of the speech. That is, it is a retelling of words from the stage, not a confirmed announcement. Apsara Conference is a venue where Alibaba Cloud presents updates to its cloud services.
Qwen (Alibaba's family of large language models) is not a new product: the line has been developing for several years, and previous generations were used in cloud services and open releases. The line's history includes different access options, but there is no such data for Qwen4. The note does not say how Qwen4 differs from the previous version. There is no data on model size, architecture, training data, or license. In essence, the only difference that can be recorded is the version number and the stated timeframe: next week. The attendee did not specify the format of the statement: whether it was an oral remark, a slide, or an answer to a question.
In practice, the announcement matters for those building services on Alibaba Cloud models. If the launch takes place, developers will have to check compatibility with current integrations: API (application programming interface), request and response formats, limits. For teams comparing models by price and latency, key parameters will appear only with the documentation. For users, this may mean a choice between the current version and the new one, but without characteristics there is nothing on which to base the choice. It is too early to talk about the impact on the market: without numbers and access conditions, this is just a line in the release schedule.
It remains unknown whether Qwen4 will be open, what its restrictions and price are. The date itself is also unconfirmed: "next week" is a formulation from the retelling, not from an official message. There were no official comments from Alibaba Cloud as of the publication of the note.