Two days after Moonshot's Kimi K3 rattled chip stocks, Alibaba walked onto the WAIC stage with a bigger number of its own — "second only to Fable 5." This dossier separates what the lab confirmed from what it only claimed.
The preview is real and purchasable. The headline numbers are not — yet. Every performance figure at this launch carries a caveat.
Preview is live and purchasable — sold through Alibaba's Token Plan, Qoder and QoderWork at 10% of standard pricing.Qwen announcement · MarkTechPost
Sparse Mixture-of-Experts, multimodal — the team's first model above 1T parameters handling text, images, video and documents.Shuai Bai, Qwen developer
OpenAI & Anthropic protocol compatible — existing coding agents can point at it without rebuilding their harnesses.Alibaba team statement
Qwen3.7-Max baseline is verified — GPQA-Diamond 92.4, SWE-bench Verified 80.4%, 1M-token context, broadly corroborated by Artificial Analysis.Alibaba · Artificial Analysis
Open-weight release announced — the Qwen account says Qwen3.8 is going open-weight "soon".@Alibaba_Qwen
2.4 trillion parameters — Alibaba's own figure. No model card, no spec sheet, no independent check.WAIC announcement
"Second only to Fable 5" — rests entirely on internal evaluation. No benchmark table was published.Qwen official account
Beats 3.7-Max on coding, full-stack, data analysis — the team states it "should" outperform. No scores accompany the claim.Shuai Bai
Active-parameter count — the single number that determines real inference cost for a sparse MoE. Undisclosed.not published
Open weights delivered — the previous two Max-tier flagships also launched closed and never open-sourced.AI Tools Review lineage analysis
The only verified scores belong to the predecessor. For 3.8 itself, the bar is still empty.
GLM 5.2, Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8 — the Chinese open-weight surge, and the in-house rivalry behind it: Alibaba owns roughly 36% of Moonshot AI.
Qwen crosses the trillion-parameter threshold for the first time.
Hosted only through Qwen Studio and Alibaba Cloud — a departure from shipping openly on day one.
Incremental step: 1M-token context, GPQA-Diamond 92.4, SWE-bench Verified 80.4%.
Draws praise from Vercel and Box engineers for landing within striking distance of Claude Opus 4.8 on FrontierSWE.
2.8T-parameter open-weight launch briefly tips the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index toward a bear market.
2.4T parameters, multimodal, "second only to Fable 5". Live and purchasable — weights promised, not delivered.
Bundled credits, not per-token pricing. The preview runs at 10% of standard rates.
Alibaba owns roughly 36% of Moonshot AI — Qwen 3.8 vs. Kimi K3 is two portfolio companies trading blows in the same week.
At 4-bit precision the full 2.4T model would need ~1.2 TB of storage — beyond any single multi-H200 node. What actually ships open is unknown.
Qwen3-235B-A22B activates only 22B of its 235B parameters per token. Without the equivalent ratio for 3.8, "2.4T" says little about serving cost.