Resolution

Resolves YES if as of 23:59 UTC on December 31, 2026 the highest Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score among models in AA's "Small (4B–40B)" open-weights category belongs to a Qwen model. Resolves YES if a Qwen model is tied for the highest score. Otherwise resolves NO.

Source: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/open-source/small, using the Intelligence Index version current at resolution time.

Definitions

- Small model: any model AA itself places in its Small category.

- Qwen model: a model released by Alibaba / the Qwen team whose name contains "Qwen" in its name (e.g., Qwen3.8 27B, Qwen4 32B). Third-party fine-tunes, merges, and distills do not count, even if built on Qwen weights.

- Model entry: each row AA lists counts separately, including reasoning-effort variants (e.g., "Qwen3.8 27B (xhigh)").

- Score: only independently measured scores count. Entries AA marks as estimates are ignored. Models not yet indexed by AA at resolution time do not count, regardless of self-reported benchmarks.

Fallbacks (in order)

1. If the category page is unavailable or doesn't render, use AA's individual model pages and its stated parameter counts to determine the category leader.

2. If AA is unreachable, use the nearest Wayback Machine capture within 7 days of December 31 that shows scores, or AA's official posts from that window.

3. If AA retires the Small category but still publishes per-model Intelligence Index scores and parameter counts, apply the 4B–40B total-parameter range directly.

4. Resolves N/A only if AA stops publishing the Intelligence Index.

Background

AA groups open-weights models into Tiny, Small (4B–40B), Medium (40B–150B), and Large (>150B) by their total parameter count. The Small category covers models that run on a single high-end consumer or workstation GPU.

In August 2026, Alibaba released Qwen3.8 27B. Its xhigh reasoning variant scored 52 on the Intelligence Index (v4.1.1), close to much larger frontier models. Qwen models have led in this category for most of 2026 (Qwen3.6 27B, Qwen3.8 27B).