Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards Real World Agents

https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6

Qwen

Qwen Chat offers comprehensive functionality spanning chatbot, image and video understanding, image generation, document processing, web search integration, tool utilization, and artifacts.

I understand peoples reactions of Qwen team comparing against Opus 4.5 instead of 4.6. And them comparing against Gemini Pro 3.0 instead of 3.1. But calling it misleading is a bit of stretch in my eyes, people here are acting like we immediately forgot how previous generations performed just because a new version is released.

This field is going in a incredible pace, the providers release a new model every quarter or so. The amount of criticism is a bit overblown in my opinion. The benchmarks still look very good to me. I’ve used GLM-5 (latest is GLM-5.1) and Kimi K2.5, they are decent and gets the job done, so seeing how this model of Qwen performs compared to it is kinda impressive.

Also, why are so many pointing out the fact that this model is not open-weight as if this is their first time doing so. Qwen-3.5-plus, Qwen-3-Max is also closed source. This is not something new.

I think Qwen trying to catch up to the SOTA models is still healthy for us, the consumers. Sure, its sad news that this version is closed-weight, but I won’t downplay their progress.

I think it’s more the principle of deception that upsets people. Imagine if Apple released a new iPhone and publicly compared its specs to some previous gen Android. It’s not in good faith.
Why are we so quick to call it deception? Their figure is quite clear. They aren't fiddling with the graph or hiding the labels, they are clearly stating which models it compares against. But I agree on the sentiment that the standard practice should be to bench against the latest SOTA models.