Simon Willison’s Weblog

Qwen2-VL: To See the World More Clearly. Qwen is Alibaba Cloud's organization training LLMs. Their latest model is Qwen2-VL - a vision LLM - and it's getting some really positive buzz. Here's a r/LocalLLaMA thread about the model.

The original Qwen models were licensed under their custom Tongyi Qianwen license, but starting with Qwen2 on June 7th 2024 they switched to Apache 2.0, at least for their smaller models:

While Qwen2-72B as well as its instruction-tuned models still uses the original Qianwen License, all other models, including Qwen2-0.5B, Qwen2-1.5B, Qwen2-7B, and Qwen2-57B-A14B, turn to adopt Apache 2.0

Here's where things get odd: shortly before I first published this post the Qwen GitHub organization, and their GitHub pages hosted blog, both disappeared and returned 404s pages. I asked on Twitter but nobody seems to know what's happened to them.

Update: this was accidental and was resolved on 5th September.

The Qwen Hugging Face page is still up - it's just the GitHub organization that has mysteriously vanished.

Inspired by Dylan Freedman I tried the model using GanymedeNil/Qwen2-VL-7B on Hugging Face Spaces, and found that it was exceptionally good at extracting text from unruly handwriting:

The model apparently runs great on NVIDIA GPUs, and very slowly using the MPS PyTorch backend on Apple Silicon. Qwen previously released MLX builds of their non-vision Qwen2 models, so hopefully there will be an Apple Silicon optimized MLX model for Qwen2-VL soon as well.