Alibaba unveils largest AI model Qwen3.8-Max as competition intensifies

China's Alibaba on Monday unveiled what ??it said is its largest and most capable artificial-intelligence model, the Qwen3.8-Max, which is not far behind in size when compared with an offering from domestic rival Moonshot AI launched last month. 

Chinese tech companies - a huge ‌force in open-weight AI models globally - are locked in ​a fierce and fast-moving battle to build ​more powerful systems without making them prohibitively expensive to run. 

Qwen3.8-Max has 2.4 trillion parameters, the numerical settings ​a model learns from data and uses to recognise patterns, generate answers, and carry out tasks. Moonshot's Kimi K3 has 2.8 trillion parameters. 

A higher figure does not automatically make a model better, but it has become a closely watched measure of the scale of the computing and data behind advanced AI ​systems. 

Chinese tech companies are keen to publish parameter count to help their models gain traction among the ‌developer community. Their models tend to be open-weight, meaning the underlying learned settings that allow developers ​to run or adapt the system are available for download. 

By contrast, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google do not publish parameter count for their closed-source models. 

Qwen3.8-Max was unveiled on crowdsourced, model-comparison platform Arena.AI, where it immediately became the highest-ranking Chinese model ‌in terms of text models, though ​it still lags Claude Fable 5 and three Opus ‌variants which are all from Anthropic. 

But on Arena.AI's leaderboard for AI models that analyse images and other ‌visual ??material, Qwen3.8-Max ranked second globally, only behind a Claude Fable 5 variant. 

Both Qwen3.8-Max and Kimi K3 ​can handle text, images and video, and process up to 1 million tokens at a time.

Tokens are chunks of data, often parts of words or ​short words, and a big figure means the model can take in large amounts of material in one go, such as long legal files, a large software codebase or ‌hundreds of pages of documents. 

Alibaba said its model uses a "mixture-of-experts" design, which divides work among specialised parts ‌of the system instead of switching on the entire model for every request. Only 95 billion parameters are used at a time, reducing costs and response delays.

The tech giant said the model completed a software-engineering project in 16 days. 

The Qwen3.8-Max is due to be released next week through Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio platform.