# Alibaba's Qwen Releases Compact 0.8B Vision Model

> The new 800-million-parameter model is the smallest in the Qwen3.5 family, designed for efficient multimodal tasks on consumer-grade hardware.

Published by The Open Weights on Feb 28, 2026. Canonical: https://theopenweights.com/news/qwen3-5-0-8b-s4x3

## Key facts

- Company: Qwen · Alibaba
- Model: Qwen3.8-27B
- Version: 3.5
- Category: Vision-Language
- Modalities: Vision-Language, Text / LLM
- License: Apache 2.0 (Open weights, commercial use allowed)
- Parameters: 800M
- Context window: 262K tokens
- Architecture: Qwen3_5ForConditionalGeneration
- Precision: BF16
- Weights size: 1.7 GB
- Significance: minor
- Published: 2026-02-28
- Last verified: 2026-06-17
- Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-0.8B
- Canonical URL: https://theopenweights.com/news/qwen3-5-0-8b-s4x3

The Qwen team at Alibaba has released a new, notably compact model in its latest series: Qwen3.5-0.8B. As a vision-language model (VLM) with just 800 million parameters, it represents one of the smallest multimodal offerings from a major AI lab.

This instruction-tuned model is designed to understand and respond to prompts that combine both text and images. Its capabilities include tasks like describing what's in a photo, answering questions about visual content, and engaging in simple, visually-grounded dialogue.

The primary advantage of Qwen3.5-0.8B is its efficiency. The sub-billion parameter size makes it a practical choice for developers and researchers working with limited computational resources, such as consumer-grade GPUs or edge devices. It lowers the barrier to entry for experimenting with multimodal AI.

Released under a permissive [Apache 2.0 license](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-0.8B), the model is available for both academic and commercial use. It joins a growing Qwen3.5 family, providing a lightweight option for applications where a larger, more resource-intensive model would be impractical.

## Get the model

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-0.8B)

## Sources

- [Qwen/Qwen3.5-0.8B](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-0.8B) — Hugging Face, Feb 28, 2026

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Source: The Open Weights (https://theopenweights.com/). Aggregated and written by Claude, curated by humans. Cite as: "Alibaba's Qwen Releases Compact 0.8B Vision Model", The Open Weights, Feb 28, 2026, https://theopenweights.com/news/qwen3-5-0-8b-s4x3