Alibaba has released Qwen, an affordable AI model, for free use

Alibaba has released a new model in its Qwen series of artificial intelligence designed for everyday use. The company hopes this will boost the popularity of its flagship AI platform worldwide, according to Bloomberg.

On August 26, Chinese tech giant Alibaba made its Qwen3.8-Flash AI model available for download and disclosed its weights—a set of values that determine how the AI system makes decisions. The new model has 125 billion parameters—one measure of its complexity. According to Alibaba, Qwen3.8-Flash is comparable in performance to some of its competitors’ latest models, including Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 and DeepSeek’s V4-Flash. However, with Qwen, users will be able to run it on their own servers, configure it, and fine-tune it. The license restricts only commercial use.

Alibaba's new model uses an architecture designed for the next generation—the Qwen 4 series. According to the company, this system significantly reduces costs for both AI training and inference—the process of generating responses to user queries.

Alibaba, which has evolved from an e-commerce giant into a major player in the artificial intelligence market, has accelerated the expansion of its AI product lineup. This month, the company updated its flagship model, Qwen3.8 Max, the largest in its history. And on Wednesday, it also released an international version of QwenWork, an agent-based AI designed for corporate clients. The company hopes to use this product to boost sales in global markets, focusing primarily on Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, according to Bloomberg.

Alibaba spends more on AI than any other Chinese company, the agency notes. It has committed to investing over 380 billion yuan ($57 billion) in AI development and the construction of related infrastructure over the next three years. To finance these expenditures, the company raised 80 billion Hong Kong dollars ($10.2 billion) this week in Hong Kong’s largest secondary share offering, reaffirming its intention to accumulate and invest massive funds to achieve global leadership in AI.

For shareholders, the main question is whether all these expenses will pay off, Bloomberg reports. Investors around the world are already asking this question, and Nvidia’s earnings report on Wednesday will serve as an important test of the sustainability of the investment case surrounding AI, the agency notes. For Chinese tech companies like Alibaba, the bar may be even higher, it says.

“Compared to their much larger American competitors, who are favored by investors, Chinese technology platforms face significantly closer scrutiny from investors when they do the same thing, — noted Homin Li, a strategist at Lombard Odier, in an interview with Bloomberg. “This is not surprising: the low-margin, high-volume approach that underpins most Chinese AI strategies makes AI capital expenditures a more ambiguous driver in terms of return on investment.”

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor