Alibaba's flagship Qwen 3.8 model rivals Anthropic's Fable 5
What's the story
Alibaba has launched its latest open-weight AI model, Qwen 3.8, with a whopping 24 trillion parameters. The tech giant claims that the new model matches the performance of leading frontier AI models, only falling short of Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 in some benchmarks. A preview of Qwen 3.8 is currently available via Alibaba Token, Qoder, and Qoder Work.
Performance boost
Qwen 3.8 excels in coding, reasoning, and productivity tasks
Alibaba says Qwen 3.8 is a major upgrade over its predecessor, Qwen 3.7 Max, especially in coding and reasoning tasks.
The new model also handles complex productivity tasks like full-stack software development, data analysis, and office workflows much better than the previous version.
This improvement highlights Alibaba's commitment to advancing AI technology for practical applications across various fields.
Market competition
Qwen 3.8 could overshadow Moonshot's Kimi K3
The launch of Qwen 3.8 could also affect the growth of Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 model.
Even though Moonshot has promised to open-source its model, users can only access it via its chatbot and API for now.
This move is aimed at converting interest into paying customers, but Alibaba's competing launch might disrupt this strategy as Moonshot reportedly prepares for an IPO in the next six months.
AI advancements
Kimi K3 launched just days before Qwen 3.8
Just days before Qwen 3.8's launch, Beijing-based Moonshot AI had unveiled its own model, Kimi K3, with 2.8 trillion parameters.
While it still lags behind the most powerful proprietary models overall, it has shown frontier-level performance on several benchmarks.
The company plans to open-source the model in a bid to attract more users and developers into its ecosystem.
Open-weight release
Future plans for Qwen 3.8
Alibaba has also teased its future plans by announcing that Qwen 3.8 will be released as an open-weight model soon.
This means developers will get access to the model's learned parameters (weights), while the training data and source code remain proprietary.
The move is likely to further boost developer engagement with Alibaba's AI technology in the coming months.