China-based technology company Alibaba has introduced Qwen3.8-Max, its largest and most advanced artificial intelligence model so far, as competition among Chinese AI developers continues to intensify. The new model is positioned close to Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, which was launched last month.
Chinese technology companies are competing to develop powerful open-weight AI models that can deliver advanced capabilities while keeping operational costs under control. Qwen3.8-Max comes with 2.4 trillion parameters, which represent the settings a model learns from data to identify patterns, generate responses, and perform tasks. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 has 2.8 trillion parameters.
While a higher parameter count does not always guarantee better performance, it has become an important indicator of the computing power and data scale behind advanced AI systems. Chinese AI companies often highlight these figures to attract developers, as their open-weight models allow users to download and customise the underlying systems.
Unlike open-weight models, companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google do not disclose parameter counts for their closed-source AI models.
Alibaba unveiled Qwen3.8-Max on a crowdsourced AI model comparison platform, where it quickly became the highest-ranked Chinese text model. However, it continues to trail Claude Fable 5 and 3 Opus variants developed by Anthropic.
In visual AI rankings, Qwen3.8-Max secured the 2nd position globally, ranking only behind a Claude Fable 5 variant. The model can process text, images, and video, while supporting up to 1 million tokens at a time. This allows it to handle large amounts of information, including lengthy legal documents, software codebases, and extensive reports.
Alibaba said Qwen3.8-Max uses a “mixture-of-experts” architecture, where specialised parts of the system handle different tasks instead of activating the entire model for every request. Only 95 billion parameters are used at a time, helping reduce costs and improve response speed.
The company also claimed that the model completed a software engineering project in 16 days. Qwen3.8-Max is scheduled to be available next week through Alibaba Cloud’s Model Studio platform.
Also read: Viksit Workforce for a Viksit Bharat
Do Follow: The Mainstream LinkedIn | The Mainstream Facebook | The Mainstream Youtube | The Mainstream Twitter
About us:
The Mainstream is a premier platform delivering the latest updates and informed perspectives across the technology business and cyber landscape. Built on research-driven, thought leadership and original intellectual property, The Mainstream also curates summits & conferences that convene decision makers to explore how technology reshapes industries and leadership. With a growing presence in India and globally across the Middle East, Africa, ASEAN, the USA, the UK and Australia, The Mainstream carries a vision to bring the latest happenings and insights to 8.2 billion people and to place technology at the centre of conversation for leaders navigating the future.