Alibaba announced its "most powerful" AI model to date, Qwen3.8-Max, on Monday, as Chinese companies race to close the AI gap with the U.S. The model is scheduled for release next week and has 2.4 trillion parameters, with a context window of up to 1 million tokens. Shares reacted positively: New York-listed shares rose 4.5% in premarket trading, and Hong Kong shares climbed 7%.

Qwen3.8-Max's capabilities include coding, real-world work, research, long-horizon tasks, and visual intelligence. Alibaba shared benchmark results showing it performing comparably or better than a model from Anthropic in some tests. The company said it ranks second to that model in the Vision Arena and fifth in the Text Arena.

The unveiling follows Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 earlier this month, which has 2.8 trillion parameters and is China's largest AI model. Alibaba also said Qwen3.8-Max can code autonomously for weeks; in an internal test, it spent 16 days building and improving an AI coding tool. The model can handle real-world workloads such as reviewing legal documents, conducting financial research, or architectural 3D modeling. Its visual intelligence can understand hundred-page documents, TV series, or 100-hour livestreams, turning them into searchable, interactive resources.

Source: CNBC