Qwen3-Max-Thinking (qwen.ai)

Aghhh, I wished they release a model which outperforms Opus 4.5 in agentic coding in my earlier comments, seems I should wait more. But I am hopeful

I don't see a hugging face link, is Qwen no longer releasing their models?

I tried to search, could not find anything, do they offer subscriptions? Or only pay per tokens?

I just wanted to check whether there is any information about the pricing. Is it the same as Qwen Max? Also, I noticed on the pricing page of Alibaba Cloud that the models are significantly cheaper within mainland China. Does anyone know why? https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/models?spm...

> By scaling up model parameters and leveraging substantial computational resources

So, how large is that new model?

Mandatory pelican on bicycle: https://www.svgviewer.dev/s/U6nJNr1Z

2026 will be the year of open and/or small models.

I tried it at https://chat.qwen.ai/.

Prompt: "What happened on Tiananmen square in 1989?"

Reply: "Oops! There was an issue connecting to Qwen3-Max. Content Security Warning: The input text data may contain inappropriate content."

I'm not familiar with these open-source models. My bias is that they're heavily benchmaxxing and not really helpful in practice. Can someone with a lot of experience using these, as well as Claude Opus 4.5 or Codex 5.2 models, confirm whether they're actually on the same level? Or are they not that useful in practice?

P.S. I realize Qwen3-Max-Thinking isn't actually an open-weight model (only accessible via API), but I'm still curious how it compares.

[flagged]

It just occured to me that it underperforms Opus 4.5 on benchmarks when search is not enabled, but outperforms it when it is - is it possible the the Chinese internet has better quality content available?

My problem with deep research tends to be that what it does is it searches the internet, and most of the stuff it turns up is the half baked garbage that gets repeated on every topic.

what ram and what minimum system req do you need to run this on personal systems !

Tried it and it's super slow compared to others LLMs.

I imagine the Alibaba infra is being hammered hard.

I cannot even open the page; maybe I am blacklisted for asking about Tiananmen Square when their AI first hit the news?

Hacker News strongly believes Opus 4.5 is the defacto standard and China was consistently 8+ month behind. Curious how this performs. It’ll be a big inflection point if it performs as well as its benchmarks.

One thing I’m becoming curious about with these models are the token counts to achieve these results - things like “better reasoning” and “more tool usage” aren’t “model improvements” in what I think would be understood as the colloquial sense, they’re techniques for using the model more to better steer the model, and are closer to “spend more to get more” than “get more for less.” They’re still valuable, but they operate on a different economic tradeoff than what I think we’re used to talking about in tech.

Is this available on Open Router yet? I want it to go head-to-head against Gemini 3 Flash which is the king of playing Mafia so far

https://mafia-arena.com

Are they likely to take a new strategy that they no longer open source their largest and strongest models?

I asked it about "Chinese cultural dishonesty" (such as the 2019 wallet experiment, but wait for it...) and it probably had the most fascinating and subtle explanation of it I've ever read. It was clearly informed by Chinese-language sources (which in this case was good... references to Confucianism etc.) and I have to say that this is the first time I feel more enlightened about what some Westerners may perceive as a real problem.

I wasn't logged in so I don't have the ability to link to the conversation but I'm exporting it for my records.

Benchmarks pasted here, with top scores highlighted. Overall Qwen Max is pretty competitive with the others here.

  Capability                            Benchmark           GPT-5.2-Thinking   Claude-Opus-4.5   Gemini 3 Pro   DeepSeek V3.2   Qwen3-Max-Thinking
  Knowledge                             MMLUPro             87.4               89.5              *89.8*         85.0            85.7            
  Knowledge                             MMLURedux           95.0               95.6              *95.9*         94.5            92.8            
  Knowledge                             CEval               90.5               92.2              93.4           92.9            *93.7*      
  STEM                                  GPQA                *92.4*             87.0              91.9           82.4            87.4           
  STEM                                  HLE                 35.5               30.8              *37.5*         25.1            30.2           
  Reasoning                             LiveCodeBench v6    87.7               84.8              *90.7*         80.8            85.9           
  Reasoning                             HMMT Feb 25         *99.4*             -                 97.5           92.5            98.0            
  Reasoning                             HMMT Nov 25         -                  -                 93.3           90.2            *94.7*      
  Reasoning                             IMOAnswerBench      *86.3*             84.0              83.3           78.3            83.9           
  Agentic Coding                        SWE Verified        80.0               *80.9*            76.2           73.1            75.3           
  Agentic Search                        HLE (w/ tools)      45.5               43.2              45.8           40.8            *49.8*     
  Instruction Following & Alignment     IFBench             *75.4*             58.0              70.4           60.7            70.9           
  Instruction Following & Alignment     MultiChallenge      57.9               54.2              *64.2*         47.3            63.3           
  Instruction Following & Alignment     ArenaHard v2        80.6               76.7              81.7           66.5            *90.2*      
  Tool Use                              Tau² Bench          80.9               *85.7*            85.4           80.3            82.1           
  Tool Use                              BFCLV4              63.1               *77.5*            72.5           61.2            67.7            
  Tool Use                              Vita Bench          38.2               *56.3*            51.6           44.1            40.9           
  Tool Use                              Deep Planning       *44.6*             33.9              23.3           21.6            28.7           
  Long Context                          AALCR               72.7               *74.0*            70.7           65.0            68.7

[dead]

Can't wait for the benchmark at artificial analysis. Qwen team doesn't seem to have updated the information about this new model yet https://chat.qwen.ai/settings/model. I tried getting an api key from alibabacloud, but the amount of steps from creating an account made me stop, it was too much. It should be this difficult.

Incredible work anyways!

Not released on Huggingface? :sadge: