Reuters article
Alibaba unveils its most capable AI model to date, not far behind Moonshot's in size
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/alibaba-unveils-its-most-capable-ai-model-date-not-far-behind-moonshots-size-2026-08-03/
Here is a summary.
Chinese Alibaba unveiled Qwen3.8-Max on Monday, claiming it to be the largest and most capable AI model released by the company so far.
Qwen3.8-Max has 240 billion parameters. Moonshot's Kimi K3 has 280 billion parameters. Having a large number of parameters doesn't automatically mean a model is more capable, but it is an indicator of the computing resources and data scale needed to drive AI, making it a closely watched metric in the industry.
Chinese companies actively disclose the number of parameters to encourage widespread use of their models within the developer community. These models are generally open weight, meaning developers can download the internal numerical settings that the model has learned from, allowing them to run or modify the system. In contrast, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google do not publicly disclose the parameter counts for their closed-source models.
Alibaba said it used this model to complete a software engineering project in just 16 days.
Qwen3.8-Max is scheduled to be released next week through Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio platform.
https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2084100720329130304
