Alibaba
Released April 28, 2025Cutoff March 2025

Qwen3 8B

Qwen3 8B is Alibaba's Qwen dense reasoning model with a documented thinking-mode switch, agent tool integration, and support for 100+ languages.

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Model Overview

Capabilities, design details, and architectural traits

Qwen3 8B - Dense Model with a Documented Thinking-Mode Switch

Qwen3 8B is a dense, causal language model in Qwen's Qwen3 series. Its defining trait, documented directly in its model card, is a built-in mechanism for moving between thinking mode and non-thinking mode inside one set of weights, rather than shipping these as separate models.

  • Hard switch: the enable_thinking parameter, set in the chat template or API call, locks the model into thinking mode (which produces a visible `` block before the answer) or non-thinking mode for the whole session.
  • Soft switch: when thinking mode is enabled, a user can add /think or /no_think directly inside a message to change the mode turn by turn, and the model follows whichever tag appeared most recently in the conversation.

Agent Use and Language Coverage

  • Documented to work with Qwen-Agent for tool calling in both thinking and non-thinking modes, using MCP configuration files or built-in tools such as a code interpreter.
  • Supports 100+ languages and dialects for instruction following and translation.
  • Native context length of 32,768 tokens, validated up to 131,072 tokens using the YaRN scaling method for long-text processing.

Benchmark Performance

Independent evaluations · Artificial Analysis

7.3%
Intelligence
9.0%
Coding Index
0.8%
Agentic Index

Accuracy & Capability Details

GPQA - Graduate Science58.9%
Humanity's Last Exam3.9%
SciCode - Scientific Coding27.9%
Instruction Following33.5%
Long Context Reasoning0.0%
τ²-Bench - Agentic Tasks27.8%
TerminalBench - System Control2.3%

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Evaluate specifications, pricing, and independent benchmark indices

Model Details
General Info
ProviderAlibabaAnthropicAnthropic
Release DateApril 28, 2025September 22, 2026September 28, 2026
Knowledge CutoffMar 2025-Jun 2026
Context & Limits
Context Window33K
1M
Best Context Window
1M
Best Context Window
Pricing (per 1M tokens)
Input Pricing
$0.20
Best Input Pricing
$4$2
Output Pricing
$0.20
Best Output Pricing
$20$10
Modalities
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Benchmarks (0-100)
Intelligence Index6.0
57.6
Best Intelligence Index
56.0
Coding Index---
Agentic Index---
Qwen3 8B
Claude Opus 5.5
Claude Sonnet 5.5

Humanity's Last Exam

Extremely difficult logical reasoning and knowledge.

2%
Qwen3 8B
Humanity's Last Exam
Score: 2%
Qwen3 8B
61%
Claude Opus 5.5
Humanity's Last Exam
Score: 61%
Claude Opus 5.5
55%
Claude Sonnet 5.5
Humanity's Last Exam
Score: 55%
Claude Sonnet 5.5

Long Context Reasoning

Logical reasoning over long context windows.

0%
Qwen3 8B
Long Context Reasoning
Score: 0%
Qwen3 8B
85%
Claude Opus 5.5
Long Context Reasoning
Score: 85%
Claude Opus 5.5
83%
Claude Sonnet 5.5
Long Context Reasoning
Score: 83%
Claude Sonnet 5.5

SciCode Benchmark

Scientific coding and mathematical modeling.

17%
Qwen3 8B
SciCode Benchmark
Score: 17%
Qwen3 8B
67%
Claude Opus 5.5
SciCode Benchmark
Score: 67%
Claude Opus 5.5
61%
Claude Sonnet 5.5
SciCode Benchmark
Score: 61%
Claude Sonnet 5.5

Independent evaluation data provided by Artificial Analysis. To view the latest benchmarks and full details, visit their official site.

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