Alibaba Qwen Releases Qwen-Image-2.1-Turbo with 8-Step Image Generation
Alibaba open-sources an 8-step image model and launches a low-cost hosted API, cutting inference latency and hosting expenses.
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Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen-Image-2.1-Turbo on October 9, reducing the denoising steps for image generation and editing from the base model's 40 steps down to 8.
The checkpoint retains the 7B visual generation architecture and supports native transparent RGBA output alongside multi-reference editing. Alibaba Cloud Model Studio simultaneously launched hosted APIs, pricing the Turbo version at CNY 0.1 per image with a 120 RPM limit.
The weights are distributed under the Qwen Research License, meaning commercial self-hosting requires separate permission. No independent third-party benchmarks exist yet; the vendor reports a score of 60.28 for the base model on Qwen-Image-Bench.