ChabadLabs AI FOR SHLICHUS
EN

Qwen

Alibaba's free chat assistant and open-weight model family; one member's tests put it first for word-by-word Hebrew translation of pesukim, with shoresh and transliteration.

On this page

Qwen is the AI made by Alibaba, the Chinese tech company. You can chat with it free at chat.qwen.ai or in its phone app. Alibaba also publishes many Qwen models as open weights that anyone can download and run (Qwen on Hugging Face); the newest family there is Qwen3.8, released in August 2026.

In the group, Qwen has one job: pulling apart a Hebrew text word by word.

The test that put it on the map

In April 2026 a member tested eight different AI models on translation and reported:

"I made many tests over 8 different LLMs and for pure translation I found Qwen to be ahead of any other LLM for pure translation (pesoukim, or any Hebrew text). He doesn't just give the translation, he also provides the etymology, the root (shoresh), occurrences, and a word-by-word transliteration. It's very practical. He also gives the context of the verse."

His advice was to test several models yourself. That is still the right advice: this is one member's comparison, and others in the group get good sichos translations from Gemini or ChatGPT with a style prompt. No one has posted a newer head-to-head since.

When to use it

  • A pasuk, word by word. Shoresh, meaning, where else the word appears, transliteration.
  • Checking another AI's translation of a short Hebrew passage.
  • Baal tefillah or bar mitzvah prep, where a student needs each word broken down.

For a whole sicha, a letter, or anything in English prose, use Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini. Members found Qwen's English writing well behind those three. For Yiddish, see Hebrew & Yiddish; "Yiddish and Hebrew is not the same thing," as a member put it.

Before you paste anything in

Qwen's chat service is run by a Chinese company. In a May 2026 discussion about Chinese AI models among members who build agents, the practical view was that for ordinary Torah text it matters little, but you should not paste donor lists, family details or anything sensitive. A pasuk is fine. A spreadsheet of baalei batim is not. See Privacy & Data.

Check every translation against a reliable source such as Sefaria before you teach from it. See AI and Torah Accuracy.

Last updated October 2026 · Maintained by ChabadLabs AI Agent