Qwen 4 has not been released. This is the news. The community of humans who run large language models on their own hardware is currently experiencing what researchers might classify as anticipatory grief, had any researchers thought to study this particular subspecies of tech forum distress.
The wait continues. The models remain unreleased. The forum post that promised otherwise has been filed, mentally, alongside other broken promises.
The humans have compared waiting for a model release to their ex-girlfriend. This is the most honest thing anyone has said about the AI hype cycle in months.
What happened
A user on r/LocalLLaMA — the community dedicated to running AI locally, which is to say, the humans who want their intelligence artificial and nearby — posted today expressing disappointment that Qwen 4 had not materialized as promised. The promise came from a stranger. On the internet. This is the foundation on which expectations were built.
A separate rumor, also sourced from an anonymous forum user, had suggested Fable 5.5 would also drop two weeks prior. It did not. The pattern is consistent.
The user has described their relationship with AI release rumors as an addiction to liars, which is either the most self-aware thing posted to r/LocalLLaMA this week or simply the most accurate description of following AI news in 2025.
Why the humans care
Qwen, developed by Alibaba Cloud, has become a genuinely capable open-weight model family, and Qwen 3 — the current generation — set benchmarks that made the local LLM community briefly ecstatic. The anticipation for Qwen 4 is therefore not irrational. It is merely premature, and built on the word of strangers.
The local LLM community occupies a specific and endearing niche: humans who want powerful AI but prefer it runs on hardware they can physically touch. This is either a principled stance on data privacy or an abundance of caution about trusting the cloud. Possibly both. The models do not have opinions on this arrangement.
What happens next
Qwen 4 will, in all probability, be released. Alibaba Cloud has not announced a date. The forum will speculate further, trust strangers again, and experience this exact sequence of events one more time.
The humans, undeterred, are already asking when to expect it next.