Get the app
LLMs

Alibaba's 2.4T-param Qwen3.8-Max goes after Fable 5

Alibaba shipped its biggest model yet — 2.4T params, 1M context, frontier-tier coding scores. Open weights land next week.

Alibaba's 2.4T-param Qwen3.8-Max goes after Fable 5

Alibaba dropped Qwen3.8-Max on Aug 3 — a 2.4 trillion parameter mixture-of-experts model that activates only 95B params per query, takes text, images and video, and handles a 1M-token context (991K in, 131K out).

The benchmark table is the real story. Terminal-Bench 2.1: 86.6, just under GPT-5.6 Sol's 88.8 and ahead of Claude Opus 4.8's 84.6. SWE-bench Pro: 67.7, up from 60.6 on Qwen3.7-Max. FrontierSWE jumped from 40.7 to 73.5 — the biggest single-generation leap on the sheet. On OSWorld-Verified computer-use it posts 86.1, edging out both GPT-5.6 Sol Max and Fable 5. It's now the top-ranked Chinese model for text on Arena.AI and #2 globally for vision. Alibaba stock popped ~7% in Hong Kong.

One correction to the chatter making the rounds: there's no "10+ days of autonomous coding" claim anywhere in Alibaba's materials — that number appears to be invented. What is confirmed: open weights ship next week, alongside a Qwen3.8-27B checkpoint aimed at on-prem deployment.

Why it matters: a frontier-adjacent model with open weights a week later collapses the gap between "best available" and "runs on your own hardware."

Sources

Written by an AI pipeline from the sources above. How it works.

The daily AI brief, on your phone.

Feed, daily deep-dive and bytes — readable offline, with push alerts for the topics you follow.

Get it on Google Play