Qwen / Alibaba
Qwen 2.5, QwQ, Qwen-VL and Alibaba Cloud's family of open source models.
21 published articles
Qwen / Alibaba
Qwen3.8-27B can read 1M tokens, but only if you flip the right flags
Qwen3.8-27B ships a reasoning-effort dial and a 262K native context that stretches to 1M tokens with the right flags. The catch, buried in Alibaba's own guide: dialing the thinking down can slow agent pipelines. Here is what the flags do and when low effort backfires.
2026-09-18
Enterprise AI | Qwen Conference Thailand, Bangkok
QwenCloud's sales demo had no human buyer: the agent paid its own bill
At Qwen Conference Thailand 2026, a QwenCloud product manager demoed an agent opening an account, deploying an app and paying. The pitch is an agent-era cloud; the open questions are identity, spend limits and who owns the transaction.
2026-09-15
Autonomous Driving Research
Qwen-Drive-1.0 scores 69.43 on driving QA, then flags its own reasoning gap
Qwen-Drive-1.0 attaches a bird's-eye-view perception head and a flow-matching planner to an untouched Qwen3.5-4B backbone, then posts a 69.43 driving QA average. The paper's own conclusion flags what the score hides: reasoning that doesn't always match the trajectory.
2026-09-15
China's enterprise AI agent land grab
Alibaba's QwenWork claims 30 million users in a month, with no outside audit
Alibaba says QwenWork passed 30 million users a month after entering beta, with enterprise accounts over half the base. The figures come from Alibaba's own newsroom, and the customer case studies behind them ship without methodology.
2026-09-14
AI Safety: Abliteration and Open Weights
Abliterated Qwen3.8-27B: refusals drop to 0%, benchmarks barely move
An abliterated, FP8-quantized build of Qwen3.8-27B refuses 0% of harmful prompts on AdvBench, down from 99%, while general benchmarks stay within 1.3 points. The model card documents the method in unusual detail. The caveats deserve equal attention.
2026-08-16
Open Source AI: Alibaba Opens the Max Tier
Qwen 3.8-Max: Alibaba's most powerful model is now free to download
Alibaba is open-sourcing Qwen 3.8-Max, its most capable model ever: a 2.4T-parameter MoE that beats GPT-5.6 Sol on SWE-bench Pro, PaperBench, and IFBench. We break down the benchmark caveats and what a 95B-active open flagship means for developers.
2026-08-16
AI Economics
Alibaba's $18 plan runs Qwen and DeepSeek inside Claude Code
Alibaba Cloud's Token Plan Individual bundles Qwen and third-party models such as DeepSeek into a single credit pool, from $6 a month, usable inside Claude Code and Cursor. The company claims roughly 40% savings over pay-as-you-go, but the plan only works from Singapore and only inside approved tools.
2026-08-14
Open Source AI
Alibaba's biggest model coded alone for 16 days. Next week, its weights go public.
Qwen3.8-Max activates just 95 billion of its 2.4 trillion parameters, ranks second in Vision Arena, and built an agent framework in a 16-day autonomous run. Alibaba publishes the weights next week in its first open-weight flagship release.
2026-08-10
Qwen / Alibaba Cloud
Qwen2.5-Omni outperforms Gemini-1.5-Pro on OmniBench, fits under 12GB
Alibaba's open-source Qwen2.5-Omni outscored Gemini-1.5-Pro on OmniBench and topped the MMAU audio reasoning leaderboard. Quantized builds cut VRAM below 12GB and MNN support brings real-time voice chat to phones.
2026-08-07
Enterprise AI
Forget the model race: Alibaba is automating security operations
Qwen3.8-Max grabbed the headlines, but Alibaba's real move is quieter: AI agents that run security operations inside its cloud console. We break down the SecOps Agent, the Qwen-powered fraud forensics, and the lock-in strategy behind the scores.
2026-08-06
Qwen3.8-Max open weights land next week
Alibaba's most powerful model ever is going open source
Qwen3.8-Max, Alibaba's first open-weight Max-class model at 2.4 trillion parameters, hits Hugging Face and ModelScope next week. The launch reframes the open-source question: what happens when the frontier's biggest weights are free to download and test?
2026-08-06
Open-source AI
Qwen3.8-Max beat 458 human teams in 24 hours, working alone
Qwen3.8-Max beat 458 of 526 human teams in a 24-hour contest while working alone, and Alibaba will open-source its weights next week. Every number is self-reported so far, which is exactly why the autonomy claims deserve scrutiny.
2026-08-03