● Covered by 5 sources · 11 reportsMedium impact1 negative10 neutral
Alibaba Releases Qwen3.8-Max and Qwen3.8-27B AI Models, Including Open Weights
Key points
- Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4 trillion parameter multimodal AI model.
- Qwen3.8-Max supports a 1 million token context window.
- A 27-billion-parameter version, Qwen3.8-27B, was also released with open weights.
- Both models are designed for complex tasks, coding, and research.
- Alibaba claims Qwen3.8-Max performance rivals models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
Alibaba Unveils New Qwen3.8 AI Models
Alibaba has announced the release of its Qwen3.8-Max and Qwen3.8-27B AI models. Qwen3.8-Max is a multimodal model featuring 2.4 trillion parameters and a context window of up to 1 million tokens. The company states this makes it its most capable AI model to date. Qwen3.8-27B is a smaller, 27-billion-parameter version designed for local deployment.
Both models are built on the architectural foundation of Qwen3.5 and are intended for tasks such as coding, professional work, research, and long-horizon agentic tasks. Alibaba's own testing suggests Qwen3.8-Max performs comparably to, and in some cases surpasses, models like Anthropic's Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol Max on specific benchmarks.
Open Weights and Accessibility
Alibaba has committed to releasing the open weights for Qwen3.8-Max and Qwen3.8-27B. The weights for Qwen3.8-Max are expected to be published on Hugging Face and ModelScope, marking the first time a Qwen-Max-class model will have downloadable weights. The Qwen3.8-27B model's open weights are available under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing it to run locally on consumer hardware.
The Qwen3.8-Max model is also available through QwenCloud and Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. The release of open weights for these models brings Qwen-Max-class capabilities to the open-source community.
Architectural Details and Capabilities
Qwen3.8-Max utilizes a sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) design with hybrid attention. While it contains 2.4 trillion parameters in total, it activates approximately 95 billion for each token, which allows the model to draw on specific parts of the model needed for each task. The model's capabilities include visual intelligence, coding, and handling complex, multi-step tasks.
The Qwen3.8-27B model is a dense model with native vision-language understanding, capable of processing images and videos. Both models are designed for improved reliability in completing complex tasks.
Performance Claims and Benchmarking
Alibaba's internal testing indicates Qwen3.8-Max's performance broadly matches or exceeds that of models from Anthropic and OpenAI. On the OSWorld-Verified benchmark, Qwen3.8-Max reportedly scored 86.1, surpassing GPT-5.6 Sol Max (83.2) and Fable 5 (85.0). It also posted the highest reported score on PaperBench.
However, independent benchmarks have shown varying results, with performance influenced by factors like time and token budgets. The Qwen3.8-27B model, despite its smaller size, is claimed to perform comparably to Anthropic's Opus 4.6 on coding and knowledge work tasks, and includes vision capabilities.
✨ This summary was generated by AI from the outlets' reporting listed below. It is not independently verified and may contain errors — check the original sources. How BrevFeed works →
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Primary sources
GitHub qwen-code-dev-bot/oh-my-cli arXiv 2607.08964 GitHub vllm-project/vllm GitHub sgl-project/sglang GitHub ggerganov/llama.cpp GitHub unslothai/unslothHow outlets covered it
Alibaba has released an open-weights 27 billion parameter version of its Qwen3.8 model under the Apache 2.0 license, which can run locally on consumer hardware. Benchmarks indicate this model performs comparably to Anthropic's Opus 4.6, particularly in coding and knowledge work tasks, and includes vision capabilities.
Unsloth has released GGUF files for Qwen3.8-27B, a new version of the Qwen open-model family, featuring improved coding, agentic tasks, and native vision-language understanding. This update allows for better integration into development tools and offers more reliable task completion for complex, multi-step operations.
Qwen has released Qwen3.8-27B, an open-weight, 27-billion-parameter model with native vision-language understanding and improved agentic capabilities. This release provides a compact, deployment-friendly model for local inference, offering advancements in coding, research, and multi-step task completion.
Qwen has released Qwen3.8, a new large language model in its open-model family, featuring improved capabilities in coding, research, and agentic tasks. This release includes FP8-quantized model weights compatible with various inference frameworks, offering performance nearly identical to the original model.
Qwen has released Qwen3.8, the latest generation in its open-model family, featuring 2.4 trillion parameters and 95 billion activated parameters. This release brings Qwen-Max-class capabilities to the open-source community, improving performance in coding, professional tasks, research, and long-horizon agentic tasks.
Recent benchmarks for Alibaba's Qwen 3.8-Max model show significant performance differences depending on the time and token budgets allocated, revealing that raw benchmark scores and per-token pricing do not fully predict the actual cost of using AI models. This highlights the need for developers to consider 'cost per successful task' and explicitly define time and token budgets when evaluating and selecting models.
Alibaba announced Qwen3.8-Max, a new multimodal model with 2.4 trillion parameters, but faces criticism for promising open-source weights without immediately releasing them. This approach is seen by some as an API business model disguised as open source, similar to a previous move by Moonshot AI.
Alibaba's Qwen team unveiled Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter multimodal LLM, which reportedly outperforms GPT-5.6 Sol Max and Fable 5 on agentic computing benchmarks like OSWorld-Verified. The company also announced plans to release open weights for Qwen3.8-Max next week, potentially reshaping enterprise AI adoption if released under a permissive license.
Alibaba has released Qwen3.8-Max, a multimodal AI model featuring 2.4 trillion parameters, available through QwenCloud and Alibaba Cloud Model Studio. This model is designed for complex, multi-day tasks and uses a sparse mixture-of-experts architecture, making it suitable for large organizations and inference providers due to its infrastructure requirements.
Alibaba introduced its Qwen3.8-Max AI model, featuring 2.4 trillion parameters and a 1 million token context window, positioning it as one of its most powerful models to date. This release contributes to the ongoing competition among Chinese tech companies to advance AI capabilities.
Alibaba has released its Qwen3.8-Max AI model, which the company states is its largest and most capable to date, with performance comparable to models from Anthropic and OpenAI. This release includes plans to make the model's weights available, marking a return to open-weight releases for Alibaba.