Alibaba Previews Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4 Trillion-Parameter Multimodal Model, Days After Moonshot’s Kimi K3 Open-Weight Launch
On July 19, Alibaba’s Qwen team previewed Qwen3.8-Max-Preview, the next flagship in the Qwen family. The research team describes it as a 2.4 trillion-parameter model, ‘second only to Fable 5’ among the systems it benchmarked. The preview is live now. The benchmark table, model card, and license are not. The July 19th 2026 announcement landed during the World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai. It also arrived two days after Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parame
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Alibaba's research team previewed a large multimodal model described as second only to one competing system among those it benchmarked. The announcement arrived during a major conference and two days after a competing lab released an open-weight model, with the timing interpreted as a competitive response. The preview is currently available through a subscription service at reduced pricing, though the benchmark table, model card, and license have not yet been published. Developers expressed cautious optimism about another open-weight model release, but also skepticism about unverified performance claims and practical concerns about the computational resources required to run such a large system.
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