Qwen / Alibaba
Qwen 2.5, QwQ, Qwen-VL and Alibaba Cloud's family of open source models.
18 published articles
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
Qwen / Alibaba
Alibaba splits its flagship AI model in two because one size fits nobody
Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen3-2507, splitting its model line into dedicated instruct and thinking variants. The update brings substantial gains in reasoning, instruction following, and 256K context support, extensible to 1M tokens.
2026-07-29
Speech synthesis
Alibaba's new TTS model speaks 16 languages, laughs on command, and might actually ship
Alibaba's Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS is a production-oriented speech synthesis system that combines a low-frame-rate tokenizer with progressive training. It supports 16 languages, 20 Chinese dialect regions, and natural-language instructions for emotion, pace, and speaking style.
2026-07-26
Qwen Cloud
Qwen Cloud just made 40% of your AI costs vanish, and it works with Claude Code
Qwen Cloud's Token Plan bundles access to text, vision, speech, and image generation models under one subscription, promising 40% savings versus pay-as-you-go. It works with Cline, Claude Code, and other tools that support OpenAI and Anthropic protocols.
2026-07-24
Artificial Intelligence
The 7B model that beats bigger ones, runs on a phone, and changes the AI cost equation
Alibaba Cloud's Qwen2.5-Omni is a 7B model that handles text, images, audio, and video, generating speech and text in real time. Its Thinker-Talker architecture and TMRoPE position embedding enable streaming interaction, and the 3B variant runs on mobile SoCs like Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 at usable speeds.
2026-07-23