Qwen is an open-weight language model family from Alibaba, released in a range of sizes and with a strong showing on multilingual and code benchmarks. It solves the same problem as other open-weight models: letting a team run a capable model without depending on a closed API. It exists as one of the few families that publishes both very small and very large variants, which makes it a common default when you need a model that fits a specific memory budget.
DeepSeek is an open-weight model family whose published training methods attracted attention for reaching competitive quality at lower reported cost. It solves the cost question in training rather than in inference, which is where most optimisation effort goes. It exists as evidence that architecture and training-schedule choices matter enough to change what a given budget can produce, and its weights and methods are published.