New Delhi: Alibaba on Monday released its “most capable” artificial intelligence model Qwen 3.8-Max, with 2.4 trillion parameters, heating up the AI race between China and the US.
In a post on X on Monday, Alibaba described the AI model as “a new bar for coding and cowork”, adding that its open-weight version will be released next week. Open weights allow developers to download the AI model’s trained parameters and modify them as required.
Announcing the release, Alibaba also claimed that Qwen 3.8-Max performed on par with or better than Anthropic’s Fable 5 during tests.
The latest model is based on the architecture of Qwen 3.5 and can deliver improved results in lengthy tasks such as research and coding. “It can not only answer more challenging questions, but also complete complex tasks end-to-end with greater reliability, producing dependable deliverables,” said a Qwen press release.
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Making vlogs to developing apps
In terms of declared parameters, Qwen 3.8-Max is now only behind Moonshot AI‘s Kimi K3, which boasts of a total of 2.8 trillion parameters. In AI models, parameters are the variables that decide how the tool will behave and what results it will produce.
Qwen 3.8-Max also supports a context window of up to 1 million tokens, allowing it to process up to 7,50,000 words for each query.
In a promotional video, Qwen showed its new AI model undertaking complex and time-taking tasks such as “designing chips nonstop for 12 hours”, “verifying protein sources”, “reconciling finances in real time”, and “generating contracts automatically”, while users spent their time playing with pets, fishing or rock climbing.
The company said Qwen 3.8-Max can perform “real visual production tasks”, including turning your personal footage into a whole vlog, creating a Blender-based 3D interior visualisation of a floor plan, and developing applications and interactive games from simple prompts.
CNBC reported that soon after the new AI model’s release, Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares climbed 7 per cent.