China's Alibaba on Monday unveiled Qwen 3.8 Max, which the company described as its largest and most powerful AI model to date. [Reuters]
China's Alibaba on Monday unveiled Qwen 3.8 Max, which the company described as its largest and most powerful AI model to date. [Reuters]

China's Alibaba on Monday unveiled Qwen 3.8 Max, which the company described as its most powerful AI model to date.

According to Reuters, the new model is comparable in scale to Kimi K3, the popular AI model released by Moonshot AI last month.

The announcement sent Alibaba's share price surging as much as 7.7 percent intraday on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, touching HK$126 at its peak.

Qwen 3.8 Max carries 2.4 trillion parameters, compared with 2.8 trillion for Moonshot's Kimi K3.

Parameter counts are not a direct measure of performance, but are widely cited as a quantitative indicator of an AI system's computational capacity and data scale. By contrast, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google do not disclose parameter counts for their closed models.

Alibaba said the model uses a "mixture of experts" architecture that distributes tasks across specialized components rather than running the entire model for every request, activating only 95 billion parameters at a time — reducing both cost and response latency. The company said Qwen 3.8 Max can handle text, images and video, process up to 1 million tokens at once, and completed a software engineering project in 16 days.

Alibaba said Qwen 3.8 Max ranked first among Chinese text models and second globally among vision models on Arena, an AI benchmarking platform, trailing only Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. However, those rankings are based on Alibaba's own disclosures and have not been independently verified by Arena or Artificial Analysis.

Kimi K3, by contrast, has received independent verification, ranking fourth on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index with a score of 57.1.

Qwen models are already powering consumer products. Chinese authorities approved the launch of Apple Intelligence in China on July 15, and the AI language features on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro — including writing tools, image generation and a revamped Siri — run on Alibaba's Qwen models.

Qwen 3.8 Max is scheduled to launch next week through Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio platform.


yckim6452@heraldcorp.com