KOR
▲ Alibaba Group of China
Chinese tech giant Alibaba announced today (August 3) the release of "Qwen 3.8-Max," which it describes as its largest and most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model yet.
According to Reuters, this model is comparable in scale to Moonshot AI's popular "Kimi K3" AI product launched last month.
Following the announcement of the new model, Alibaba's stock surged by 7.7% compared to the previous day during trading on the Hong Kong stock market, briefly hitting 126 Hong Kong dollars.
Qwen 3.8-Max features 2.4 trillion parameters.
Moonshot's Kimi K3 has 2.8 trillion parameters.
While the number of parameters does not strictly and unconditionally scale with performance, it is frequently cited as a quantitative measure to gauge the computing power and data scale of AI systems.
On the other hand, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google do not disclose the parameter counts of their closed models.
Alibaba explained that the model adopts a "mixture-of-experts" design, which distributes tasks to specialized parts instead of running the entire model for every request, utilizing only 95 billion parameters at a time to reduce costs and response latency.
Alibaba reported that the model handles text, images, and video while processing up to 1 million tokens at once, and completed a software engineering project in 16 days.
Alibaba stated that Qwen 3.8-Max ranked first among text models in China and second globally for visual data analysis models, trailing only Anthropic's Claude 5 (Claude 3.5 Sonnet/Fable equivalent as per context), on the AI system evaluation platform Arena.
However, this ranking is based on Alibaba's own announcement and has not been officially verified by independent benchmarking institutions such as Arena or Artificial Analysis.
In contrast, Kimi K3 has received independent verification, ranking fourth with 57.1 points on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index.
The Qwen model is already embedded in actual consumer products.
Chinese authorities approved the domestic launch of Apple Intelligence on July 15, and language-related AI functions such as writing tools, image generation, and the overhauled Siri on iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Vision Pros in China are powered by Alibaba's Qwen model.
Qwen 3.8-Max is scheduled to be released next week through Alibaba Cloud's "Model Studio" platform.
(Photo: AP, Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.
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