FactArticle

Alibaba's surprise announcement of a 2.4 trillion parameter open-weight Qwen 3.8 model, coming right after Kimi K3's release, shows Chinese labs are leaning further into open-weight releases rather than just maintaining the status quo.

Lambert points to Alibaba breaking from its API-only tradition for large models by announcing an open-weight 2.4T Qwen model days after Kimi K3, as further evidence of a broader Chinese pivot toward open release. ✦ AI generated

Nathan Lambert · Interconnects · 2026-07-20 · original ↗

Share card ↓Export .md Export .txt

Alibaba announced that a 2.4 trillion parameter Qwen 3.8 model is coming soon with open-weights. Historically, Alibaba has kept their largest models as API-only offerings via their cloud business, so this is another big vibe shift opening the doors to the next chapter of the open model economy.

Read full article ↗excerpt · fair-use quotation

▦ Alibaba ✳ Kimi K3 ✳ Qwen 3.8

Around this claim

Context · 1

Chinese open-weight models like Kimi K3 are genuinely catching up to Western frontier models in performance, not just PR, as evidenced by demand overwhelming Kimi's ability to sign up new users.Jason · 20VC · conf 85%

Extends · 1

Open-weight models can be run locally, fine-tuned with proprietary data, and used entirely offline — this is a real benefit to US companies and breeds innovation independent of frontier labs.CJ · Syntax · conf 80%

This moment responds to

gives example → Chinese AI companies release open-weight models as a deliberate strategy to gain global influence and market share, since Western institutions won't pay for API subscriptions from Chinese providers over security concerns.Nathan Lambert · Lex Fridman rebuts → Several Chinese AI labs (Alibaba's Qwen, Zhipu's GLM) that were open source are moving to closed models now that they've caught up to the frontier, following the same playbook OpenAI itself used — stay open to build a developer community and catch up, then close off once you're competitive to capture value.Sacks · All-In Podcast extends → Alibaba's reversal to release Qwen 3.8 Max as open weights, after declining to release Qwen 3.7 Max in May, may have been influenced by Xi Jinping's recent speech encouraging open source.Ben Thompson · Simon Willison's Weblog provides context → Qwen3.8-Max represents a strategic shift by Alibaba toward ecosystem influence over exclusivity and the shrinking of the moat to post-training, agent harnesses, inference infra, and developer lock-in rather than raw pretraining.AINews · Latent Space