Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. released its biggest ever AI model, claiming performance on par with global leader Anthropic PBC in the latest Chinese breakthrough to challenge US rivals.
The new Qwen3.8-Max is built on 2.4 trillion parameters, a measure of a model's sophistication, and ranks higher on several benchmarks than the headline-grabbing Kimi K3 from Moonshot that was recently unveiled. Alibaba shared results showing it delivering comparable or sometimes better scores than Anthropic's Fable 5, a cutting-edge artificial intelligence model that was temporarily put under export controls by the US due to its advanced capabilities.
The debut comes days after Moonshot's Kimi sent ripples through stock markets and Silicon Valley as it showed Chinese developers quickly catching up with the top models crafted by Anthropic and OpenAI despite relatively constrained computing resources. DeepSeek also just expanded access to its latest model, V4 Flash, while ByteDance Ltd. and MiniMax Group Inc. unveiled new video generators on Friday.
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"Many investors continue to underestimate Chinese AI models because of US chip restrictions or general skepticism," said Vey-Sern Ling, managing director at Union Bancaire Privée. "In reality, the gap is probably much closer, and narrowing fast. Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 is another proof point, following Kimi K3."
Alibaba's shares surged by 7% in Hong Kong on Monday, the most in nearly a month.
The Hangzhou-headquartered internet pioneer will release the Qwen3.8-Max weights for public download next week, which will allow users to customize the technology, marking the next major move in the intensifying race among China's AI contenders that include DeepSeek, Z.ai and ByteDance.
Alongside Kimi K3 at 2.8 trillion parameters - akin to brain synapses that help an AI system store, process and respond with the help of more information - Alibaba is delivering one of the biggest models to date. Also like Moonshot, however, Alibaba uses an approach that only activates a small proportion of the full parameter set per task, to maintain efficiency.
While DeepSeek's latest is by far the most affordable among new marquee releases, Alibaba's Qwen offering is also priced aggressively at $2 per one million input tokens and $6 per million outputs. Each AI system will use a different number of tokens to handle tasks, but that still makes Alibaba's model look attractive compared to the best from the US leaders.
The new Qwen3.8-Max performs well in autonomous coding and long-horizon execution, and was able to independently perform a software engineering project over 16 days in internal testing, Alibaba said. Reducing performance degradation over long tasks or conversation is an ongoing challenge for AI developers as their models grow in complexity.
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"Alibaba's full stack of capabilities stands out," Jefferies analysts Thomas Chong and Zoey Zong wrote after the release. With AI making an increasing contribution to revenue, "margin profile is expected to improve."
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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