Qwen 3.5 Small Series Drops: Natively Multimodal, 262K Context, Apache 2.0

Alibaba released Qwen3.5-0.8B, 2B, 4B, and 9B — all natively multimodal (text+image+video from same weights, no adapter), 262K context, Apache 2.0. The 9B beats last-gen Qwen3-30B across the board and outperforms GPT-5-Nano by 13 points on MMMU-Pro. Architecture uses Gated DeltaNet hybrid (3:1 linear-to-softmax attention) for constant-memory context scaling. Critical PSA: these models require bf16 KV cache — f16 produces broken outputs (120-upvote warning thread). Biggest local-model launch day since the Qwen 3.5 flagship. r/LocalLLaMA