Alibaba Releases New AI Model as Competition Intensifies

By Tracy Qu

China's Alibaba Group released a new artificial-intelligence model as technology giants continue to race to build ever more capable systems.

The Hangzhou-based company said the model, called Qwen 3.8-Max, is the "most powerful model in the Qwen series to date." The model boasts 2.4 trillion parameters and will be fully open-source next week.

AI system parameters work like brain cells: The more a model has, the more knowledge it can store, making the count a shorthand for a model's capabilities.

The model, available on Alibaba's developer platforms, delivers a comprehensive upgrade across coding, real-world work, research and long-horizon tasks. Operating as a multimodal foundation, it also supports visual intelligence, the Chinese company said.

Qwen 3.8-Max ranks fifth on the Text Arena leaderboard for text-to-text tasks across math, coding and creative writing, behind several models by Anthropic. It is No. 2 on Vision Arena, which rates a model's ability to reason over visual inputs, according to rankings compiled by Alibaba.

China's rapid advances in AI have been spurred in part by Beijing's push for self-sufficiency as it competes for technological supremacy against the U.S. China's AI startup Moonshot AI recently released its Kimi K3 model, which has 2.8 trillion parameters.

Alibaba has been betting on AI and cloud as its growth driver for the next phase. The company expects AI-related product revenue to become the primary engine of revenue growth for the cloud segment, Chief Executive Eddie Wu said earlier this year.

Write to Tracy Qu at tracy.qu@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 02, 2026 23:55 ET (03:55 GMT)