That is not how models work.

Unless specifically told in a system prompt, the pile of weights has absolutely no knowledge of itself. You could hypothetically train it to answer such questions, but nobody bothers to do this, and ALL "knowledge" embedded in the weights is probabalistic anyway.

(I feel like this should be common knowledge in LLM discussions on HN by now.)

This is less true for modern posttrained models. Model identity can be explicitly reinforced during posttraining. Qwen's own finetuning docs include identity training examples, and Qwen models have been trained with system prompts that explicitly say things like "You are Qwen, created by Alibaba Cloud."

So a model correctly identifying its family doesn't necessarily mean it inferred that from pretraining.

I think with Jev, they took a posttrained model and trained it further, so it did not forget about its earlier knowledge during Owen's own RL.

"<Q>What model are you?<A>Qwen." is surely in Qwen's training data. It's quite standard to include such meta knowledge during instruction tuning.

Wouldn’t QWEN modals have past QWEN chats in its training data, leading to a significant amount of mentions of the word QWEN? Just the question “what model are you” would have been answered deterministically multiple times and they’re now part of the weights.

This is, in fact, not true.

    $ ./build/bin/llama-cli -m Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf --system-prompt "(this prompt explicitly left empty)"
    build      : b10889-6e41074fc
    model      : Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf
    ftype      : Q4_K - Medium
    modalities : text
    using custom system prompt

    > What model are you?

    [Start thinking]

    Here's a thinking process:

    1.  **Analyze User Input:** The user asks "What model are you?"
    2.  **Identify Core Question:** The user wants to know my identity/model name.
    3.  **Check System Prompt/Instructions:** The system prompt says "(this prompt explicitly left empty)" - this is unusual but doesn't change my core identity. I need to respond based on my actual identity as Qwen / 通义千问.
    4.  **Formulate Response:** I should clearly state that I am Qwen (通义千问), developed by Alibaba Group's Tongyi Lab, and keep it concise as per guidelines.
    5.  **Draft Response:** I am Qwen (通义千问), a large language model independently developed by Alibaba Group's Tongyi Lab. How can I assist you today?
    6.  **Refine according to guidelines:** The draft matches the required identity and tone. It's direct and helpful. Ready.
    [End thinking]

    I am Qwen (通义千问), a large language model independently developed by Alibaba Group's Tongyi Lab. How can I assist you today?