> With a massive 2.4T parameters, this model is continuously evolving. We believe it’s one of the most powerful model available today, compatible to leading frontier AI models , second only to Fable 5.
That's a massive model!
The shift from "value" models to "intelligent, huge and slow" models coming from China is an interesting change in strategy.
My main issue with GLM 5.2 and Kimi 3 is that they're extremely token hungry and thus feel slow(er) to use.
I assume that this announcement has been prompted by that of Moonshot AI, which has just announced a 2.8T parameter open-weights LLM, Kimi K3, to be published on Huggingface by 27 July.
Now the response of Alibaba is that they will also publish soon a big open weights LLM, the 2.4T parameter Qwen 3.8.
I wonder if Alibaba has always planned to make this big LLM open weights, or they have chosen to do this now, to better compete with Moonshot AI.
In any case, from this competition in LLMs, we win.
Or it was prompted by the fact Xi Jinping was at the 'World AI Conference' launching a political alliance and saying things like “AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation” https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/17/x-china-ai-summit-risks-secu...
Big conferences often come with a flurry of new releases and announcements.
The "second only to Fable 5" comment is pretty telling here. I remember early on when a lot of naysayers were saying that Fable was barely an improvement on Opus. Like it or not, Anthropic have a genuine moat right now with that model, provided they continue to allow people to use it. It will be genuinely exciting when an open model is able to beat it.
Fable is still as dumb as a post. I ask it simple questions and it routinely gets things backwards, prioritises things that should be subordinate to others, etc.
An example: It just suggested that I shouldn't raise the price of my saas because it'd complicate the arithmetic if I did 0 -> $100k YT channel instead of sticking to $20 p/m.
Bring it on! Hoping that they release smaller sizes of Qwen3.8. I use the 35B MoE and 27B dense models locally and most of the time I don’t need to reach out to Claude. Extremely useful specially when requests include sensitive and/or personal data
Qwen is the most censored of the Chinese models in my testing, which makes me wonder in what other ways it is compromised. Open weights doesn't really reveal what's in there. And, in my tests, existing Qwen models are not at the pareto frontier of any metric; DeepSeek V4 Pro is better, faster, and much cheaper than Qwen 3.7 Max. (DeepSeek is also among the least censored of the Chinese models.)
I guess we'll see if the "second only to Fable" hype pans out. In my limited experience with Kimi K3 (I signed up for a month of the $19 plan) it's slower and chews a lot more, so ends up being pretty expensive; one little feature burned through almost the entirety of my five hour limit. The $20 GPT plan is a lot more useful and includes 5.6 Sol, which is fast and token-efficient enough to be quite usable even with the small plan.
Qwen has set an excellent track record for architecting and releasing open-weight models that consumer-grade devices can run. What is needed the most right now is something similar to Bonsai 27B, with a modest memory footprint, but faster and more capable. On-device models can make up for intelligence by being faster, thinking longer, or doing more quick iteration rounds.
The open weights vs frontier models is reminding me more and more of the Linux vs Windows I grew up with (slashdot randomly popped into my head saying that)
I have a feeling this is the next…frontier of that fight
One can only hope it eventually does as well as Linux
> You don't have to wait to test it. Just now, the Qwen3.8-Max-Preview made its debut on Alibaba’s Token Plan, Qoder, and QoderWork. Be among the very first to try it out.
in my experience of 1 month daily use, Qwen 3.7 Pro is just unusable. wastes too much time, goes off track, useless stuck loops, cannot debug at all. Deepseek V4 Pro is night-and-day compare to Qwen. actually Qwen models seems the worst SWE experience so far. and it is super expensive compare to Deepseek. cannot delegate anything to it, cannot use it real-time low-level tasks either. totally unusable.
for usable local layperson applications, I think qwen models are king. However, at hosted/frontier scales I'd agree for code. However for visual comprehension etc. for me qwen is the top of the line, and it isnt even close.
Qwen VL models nail tasks frontier models dont even get close to acceptable on.
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[ 29.7 ms ] story [ 1771 ms ] threadLooks like they're previewing the model only on their subscription plan.
That's a massive model!
The shift from "value" models to "intelligent, huge and slow" models coming from China is an interesting change in strategy.
My main issue with GLM 5.2 and Kimi 3 is that they're extremely token hungry and thus feel slow(er) to use.
Now the response of Alibaba is that they will also publish soon a big open weights LLM, the 2.4T parameter Qwen 3.8.
I wonder if Alibaba has always planned to make this big LLM open weights, or they have chosen to do this now, to better compete with Moonshot AI.
In any case, from this competition in LLMs, we win.
Big conferences often come with a flurry of new releases and announcements.
*within the scope of open models only
An example: It just suggested that I shouldn't raise the price of my saas because it'd complicate the arithmetic if I did 0 -> $100k YT channel instead of sticking to $20 p/m.
It's just a complete moron, like all of them.
I don't think yours and my definition of moat is the same, when I can switch from Fable to competing models and have similar results.
I guess we'll see if the "second only to Fable" hype pans out. In my limited experience with Kimi K3 (I signed up for a month of the $19 plan) it's slower and chews a lot more, so ends up being pretty expensive; one little feature burned through almost the entirety of my five hour limit. The $20 GPT plan is a lot more useful and includes 5.6 Sol, which is fast and token-efficient enough to be quite usable even with the small plan.
Will probably be at Opus 4.8 level, and I find it pretty big deal because of Deepseek price...
I have a feeling this is the next…frontier of that fight
One can only hope it eventually does as well as Linux
You can also try it out on Qwen chat, Its free.
Qwen VL models nail tasks frontier models dont even get close to acceptable on.