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Alibaba open-sources its largest AI model for free
- Alibaba released open weights for its flagship Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B model on Aug. 12, making its largest AI model freely downloadable for the first time.
gigazine+1 - The mixture-of-experts model activates 95 billion of its 2.4 trillion parameters per token and claims benchmark scores rivaling OpenAI's and Anthropic's top models, according to Alibaba.
gigazine+1 - The open-weight version is text-only and lacks the 1 million-token context window of the commercial Qwen3.8-Max API, which launched Aug. 3 at $2 per million input tokens.
explainx+1
Alibaba has released the weights of its flagship Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B model on Hugging Face, marking the first time the company has open-sourced a Max-class model. The 2.4 trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts system, which activates 95 billion parameters per token, landed on the platform on August 12 and is compatible with standard inference frameworks including vLLM and SGLang.gigazine+2
The release follows Alibaba's August 3 launch of Qwen3.8-Max as a commercial API product, priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens through Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio. At the time, the company promised open weights within a week — a timeline it slightly overshot.scmp+1
Performance and Architecture
Qwen3.8-Max has posted benchmark results that place it among the top AI models currently available. On the OSWorld-Verified benchmark for autonomous computer tasks, it scored 86.1, ahead of Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 at 85.0. Third-party evaluator Artificial Analysis rated its intelligence performance between OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-5.6 Terra.cryptobriefing+1
The model natively supports a context window of 262,144 tokens, extensible to over one million tokens in the commercial Max version. It processes text, images, and video as a multimodal system. On Nvidia's GB300 NVL72 hardware, Alibaba reported inference speeds exceeding 4,000 tokens per second per GPU.news.aibase+2
Open-Source Strategy and Limitations
The open-weight release comes with caveats. According to reporting from Explainx.ai, the released model is text-only and does not include the one-million-token context window available in the commercial version. The weights ship under a new license that may include revenue-sharing provisions for large commercial users, according to Reuters reporting in the Straits Times.straitstimes+1
A smaller variant, Qwen3.8-27B, is expected to follow on August 15, aimed at developers who want to run the model locally. The release comes amid intensifying competition from Chinese AI labs, with Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 — a 2.8 trillion-parameter model backed in part by Alibaba — having rattled technology stocks in recent weeks.yellow
Sources (20)
- 1 Qwen3.8, a Chinese AI with 2.4 trillion parameters, has been released as an open model for free, boasting performance comparable to the most advanced models from OpenAI and Anthropic. gigazine.net
- 2 Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B: Alibaba's Open-Weight Qwen-Max ... www.mindstudio.ai
- 3 Alibaba's Qwen3.8 model goes live on Nvidia's GB300, hits 4,000 tokens per second cryptobriefing.com
- 4 Qwen3.8-Max Open Weights Are Live (August 2026) explainx.ai
- 5 Qwen 3.8 Max Ships: 2.4T MoE, 1M Context, $2/$6 per MTok, Open ... www.developersdigest.tech
- 6 Alibaba's AI model Qwen3.8-Max widely accessible ahead of open ... www.scmp.com
- 7 Alibaba Launches 2.4 Trillion-Parameter Large Model Open ... news.aibase.com
- 8 Alibaba plans to charge big users of its next open-source AI model ... www.straitstimes.com
- 9 Qwen3.8 Max Debuts With 2.4 Trillion Parameters, Trailing Only Fable 5 yellow.com
- 10 Alibaba Unveils Open-source Qwen3.8-Max AI Model - Dataconomy dataconomy.com
- 11 r/LocalLLaMA - Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B Released www.reddit.com
- 12 Qwen/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B huggingface.co
- 13 Qwen3.8-Max Review: Best AI Model of 2026 - Sesame Disk sesamedisk.com
- 14 unsloth/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B-GGUF huggingface.co
- 15 Qwen/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B · Huge disappointment huggingface.co
- 16 They Called It Open-Source. I Opened the Model Page. (Qwen3.8 ... www.youtube.com
- 17 Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max (open-weight) www.threads.com
- 18 Qwen3.8 | OpenLM.ai openlm.ai
- 19 Alibaba says Qwen3.8-Max coded autonomously for 16 days www.infoworld.com
- 20 Alibaba to Release "Qwen3.8-27B" on August 15 — Latest AI Capable of Local Deployment finance.biggo.com
