Days after a rival Chinese lab shook Silicon Valley, Alibaba has fired back. The company previewed Qwen3.8, its most powerful model yet, and made a bold claim: it trails only one model on Earth.
Alibaba unveiled the model at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. Its Qwen team said on X that Qwen3.8 is “second only to Fable 5,” a nod to Anthropic’s latest release. Alibaba shares rose as much as 5.4% on Monday.
What Qwen3.8 is
The model holds 2.4 trillion parameters. That makes it the first in the Qwen family above a trillion to be multimodal, meaning it handles images, video and documents as well as text.
Alibaba says Qwen3.8 should beat its own previous flagship, especially at coding and office work such as full-stack development and data analysis. Lead developer Shuai Bai called it the team’s first trillion-parameter multimodal model, with understanding that he said matches or beats leading proprietary systems.
