# Alibaba releases Qwen 3.8-Max with 2.4 trillion parameters

> Alibaba has released Qwen 3.8-Max, a very large model built as a mixture of experts with 2.4 trillion total parameters and about 95 billion active at any time. It handles a million-token context and takes text, image and video as input, and the company says it now ranks as the top Chinese text model on the Arena.AI leaderboard. The release followed the usual pattern for the Qwen line: availability through Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio first, then open weights for anyone to download and run. That openness is a big part of why Qwen has become a favorite base for developers who want to build on a capable model without paying per token to a closed lab. The broader story is momentum. Chinese labs keep shipping frontier-class systems and putting the weights in public, closing the gap with US firms on paper while pushing an open-weight strategy that spreads their models far beyond China.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: Bloomberg · Published Tuesday, August 18, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Alibaba has released Qwen 3.8-Max, a very large model built as a mixture of experts with 2.4 trillion total parameters and about 95 billion active at any time. It handles a million-token context and takes text, image and video as input, and the company says it now ranks as the top Chinese text model on the Arena.AI leaderboard. The release followed the usual pattern for the Qwen line: availability through Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio first, then open weights for anyone to download and run. That openness is a big part of why Qwen has become a favorite base for developers who want to build on a capable model without paying per token to a closed lab. The broader story is momentum. Chinese labs keep shipping frontier-class systems and putting the weights in public, closing the gap with US firms on paper while pushing an open-weight strategy that spreads their models far beyond China.

## Source

[Read the full story at Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-03/alibaba-drops-another-china-ai-model-with-breakthrough-performance)

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