Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. today previewed the most powerful artificial intelligence model in its Qwen family, Qwen3.8, and claimed the system trails only Anthropic PBC\u2019s Claude Fable 5 among the world\u2019s frontier models.<\/p>\n
The company revealed the model, offered as a preview build called Qwen3.8-Max-Preview, today at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. It accommodates 2.4 trillion parameters, making it the first Qwen model above 1 trillion parameters to process images, video and documents alongside text.<\/p>\n
Alibaba\u2019s Qwen team said in a post on X<\/a> that the model ranks \u201csecond only to Fable 5,\u201d a reference to Anthropic\u2019s recent release. It offered no benchmark scores to support the claim and no independent evaluation has verified the ranking.<\/p>\n That absence stands out. Alibaba\u2019s previous flagship, Qwen3.7-Max, shipped in May with a full set of published results, including a score of 56.6 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index<\/a>. The Qwen3.8 preview arrived with no model card, no activated-parameter count and no benchmark data at all.<\/p>\n Alibaba published no task-level comparison with Qwen3.7-Max and described the new model only as \u201ccontinuously evolving.\u201d Open weights are promised \u201csoon,\u201d though the company has not set a date or published license terms.<\/p>\n The preview is available now through Alibaba\u2019s Token Plan subscription and its Qoder and QoderWork developer platforms, priced at 10% of the standard rate during the trial period.<\/p>\n The timing places Qwen3.8 directly against a domestic rival. Chinese AI startup Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co. Ltd. released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter model, three days earlier<\/a>. Both launches push Chinese developers into the multi-trillion-parameter tier, a scale until recently associated mainly with the largest U.S. labs<\/p>\n Alibaba has made Qwen central to its effort to position itself as China\u2019s default AI supplier. Over the past year the company has released a steady run of open-weight models while building out cloud infrastructure and custom chips to run them. The open-weight approach has helped Qwen assemble one of the largest developer followings of any Chinese model family, a base it now hopes to carry into the trillion-parameter class.<\/p>\n For enterprise buyers weighing the announcement, the comparison with Fable 5 is Alibaba\u2019s alone. No independent leaderboard has scored Qwen3.8 yet, and the last Qwen model that was ranked, Qwen3.7-Max, sits well down LMArena\u2019s list, where Fable 5 is No. 1. Benchmarks and the promised open weights would settle it, but Alibaba has released neither.<\/p>\n Image: Alibaba\/X<\/p>\n Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE\u2019s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities.<\/p>\n 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more About SiliconANGLE Media<\/p>\n SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. 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Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. today previewed the most powerful artificial intelligence model in its Qwen family, Qwen3.8, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558440,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-558439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558439\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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