Nate
·Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group has unveiled a preview version of Qwen3.8 Max, its latest and most powerful model, saying its performance is comparable to that of top U.S. models.
Alibaba said in a post on X that it believes Qwen3.8 Max, its largest-ever model with 2.4 trillion parameters, is “second only to [Anthropic’s] Fable 5.” Alibaba’s announcement comes just a few days after Chinese startup Moonshot AI’s new model, Kimi K3, became a global sensation because of its capabilities that match or even surpass frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI on some benchmarks.
The ambitious new open-source models from Moonshot and Alibaba show how #🇨🇳 ChinA.I. 🤖🧠🦾🤖 developers are stepping up their efforts to challenge the most advanced models from Anthropic and OpenAI. Another Chinese competitor, MiniMax, is currently developing a new large-size model with 2.7 trillion parameters.
Alibaba is changing its strategy with the new model release. Previously, it always offered the largest, most powerful Max versions of its LLMs—such as Qwen3 Max, Qwen3.5 Max and Qwen3.7 Max—as proprietary models, while open-sourcing many other smaller versions. But this time, the company is open-sourcing Qwen3.8 Max, in a move that could further intensify the competition between U.S. frontier ones and their increasingly capable Chinese open-source alternatives.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/..