Alibaba unveils its most capable AI model to date, not far behind Moonshot's in size
Chinese tech companies - a huge force in open-weight AI models globally - are locked in a fierce and fast-moving battle to build more powerful systems without making them prohibitively expensive to run.
Alibaba has introduced its most advanced AI model to date, the Qwen3.8-Max, which closely follows a new offering from domestic rival Moonshot AI, the Kimi K3. The Qwen3.8-Max boasts 2.4 trillion parameters, which are numerical settings a model learns from data to recognize patterns, generate responses, and perform tasks. While a larger parameter count does not guarantee superior performance, it serves as a widely monitored metric of the scale of computing and data behind advanced AI systems.
Chinese tech companies frequently disclose parameter counts to boost their models' appeal to developers, as their models are typically open-weight, meaning the underlying settings are freely accessible for download. In contrast, closed-source models from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google do not publish parameter counts.
The Qwen3.8-Max made its debut on the crowd-sourced model-comparison platform Arena.AI, ranking as the top Chinese text model, though it trails behind Claude Fable 5 and three Opus variants from Anthropic in image and visual material analysis. Both Qwen3.8-Max and Kimi K3 can process text, images, and video, and handle up to 1 million tokens simultaneously.
Tokens are data chunks, often word fragments or short words, and a high token count indicates the model's ability to process extensive data, such as lengthy legal files, extensive software codebases, or vast numbers of pages of documents.
Alibaba has employed a "mixture-of-experts" design in Qwen3.8-Max, dividing tasks among specialized parts of the system instead of activating the entire model for each request. Only 95 billion parameters are utilized at any given time, which decreases costs and response delays. The tech giant announced that the Qwen3.8-Max completed a software-engineering project in just 16 days. The model is scheduled for release next week via Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio platform.
Written by urgent.news from Economic Times Tech's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
