Alibaba's Qwen-Image-2.1 claims to beat closed models with 7 billion parameters

Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen-Image-2.1, a 7-billion-parameter open-weight image generator and editor that the team says outperforms most closed models on its own benchmark, though independent tests are pending. It runs on consumer GPUs such as a 3090, supports transparent RGBA output and up to ten reference images, and is on Hugging Face, GitHub, and Model Scope under a research license that bars commercial use.