Alibaba launches Qwen3-Max, its most powerful AI model yet
What's the story
Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, has unveiled its most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) language model yet: Qwen3-Max. The cutting-edge model boasts more than 1 trillion parameters—variables that dictate how an AI system interprets data. Zhou Jingren, Chief Technology Officer at Alibaba Cloud, said the model excels in code generation and autonomous agent capabilities.
Advanced features
Qwen3-Max outperforms ChatGPT on several metrics
The autonomous agent capabilities of the Qwen3-Max model are designed to require fewer human prompts than traditional chatbots like ChatGPT. This allows it to make decisions and take actions independently toward a goal set by the user. Alibaba has also claimed that third-party benchmarks such as Tau2-Bench show Qwen3-Max outperforming competitors like Anthropic's Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1 on certain metrics.
Strategic focus
Alibaba to invest $53.4B in AI infrastructure
Alibaba has prioritized AI alongside its core e-commerce business. The company had previously announced a plan to invest $53 billion in AI-related infrastructure over three years. Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said they would increase spending further but did not disclose any specific figures. Along with Qwen3-Max, the company has also launched a few other AI products today. These include Qwen3-Omni, a multimodal immersive system designed for virtual and artificial reality applications such as smart glasses and intelligent cockpits.