😸 Alibaba’s 2.4T Qwen joins the AI race
The Neuron · Eric Gerard Ruiz · 2026-07-20
The Neuron newsletter reports that Alibaba previewed Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model slated for open-weight release that Alibaba claims trails only Claude Fable 5 in performance, with independent benchmark verification still pending.
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Topics: chinese-ai-modelsopen-weight-modelslarge-language-modelsrobotics
Claims
- Alibaba previewed Qwen3.8-Max with 2.4 trillion parameters and committed to releasing it as open-weight software.
- Alibaba claims Qwen3.8-Max trails only Claude Fable 5 in performance, but no independent benchmarks have yet been published to verify this.
- Sunday Robotics' ACT-2 home robot successfully completed 778 out of 785 garment-folding attempts in unfamiliar homes.
- Elon Musk stated that xAI's upcoming 2-trillion-parameter model should outperform Grok 4.5 and could surpass Kimi K3.
- China's open-model strategy creates a dual race: building the strongest model while simultaneously making it cheap and accessible enough for broad developer adoption.
Key quotes
China's open-model strategy is turning every release into two competitions at once. Labs are racing to build the strongest model, while also racing to make that capability cheap and accessible enough for developers to adopt.
A 2.4T parameter count also raises an awkward practical question: can ordinary companies afford to run it efficiently?