Alibaba releases Qwen-Image-2.1: an image generator and editor in one model that fits on a home graphics card
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Publication time restored from the build log. . Updated: .
A professional SI image editor can now be run at home, but it is no longer free for business.
The model's generative part has 7 billion parameters, three times fewer than the previous Qwen-Image (~20 billion), yet one model both draws from text and edits, accepting up to 10 reference images at once (group portraits, virtual try-on, room design). It can output an image with a transparent background directly and runs on RTX 3090-class graphics cards; on its own benchmark Qwen scored 60.28, first among open models, ahead of FLUX 2 Max (55.33). The weights are published on Hugging Face and ModelScope, but the license changed from Apache 2.0 to Qwen Research: commercial use now requires a separate agreement.