Now the response of Alibaba is that they will also publish soon a big open weights LLM, the 2.4T parameter Qwen 3.8.

I wonder if Alibaba has always planned to make this big LLM open weights, or they have chosen to do this now, to better compete with Moonshot AI.

In any case, from this competition in LLMs, we win.

Will probably be at Opus 4.8 level, and I find it pretty big deal because of Deepseek price...

I guess we'll see if the "second only to Fable" hype pans out. In my limited experience with Kimi K3 (I signed up for a month of the $19 plan) it's slower and chews a lot more, so ends up being pretty expensive; one little feature burned through almost the entirety of my five hour limit. The $20 GPT plan is a lot more useful and includes 5.6 Sol, which is fast and token-efficient enough to be quite usable even with the small plan.

I'm trying to move to local models as much as I can, and I'm finding that it's becoming more and more practical. Admittedly this is on a $6000 dollar laptop (M5 Max Macbook with the specs maxxed out), so the hardware is still a bit out of reach for most people (the AI industry isn't exactly helping here..), but I'm getting the impression that the future is going to be smaller models with more focused training running locally. The danger of giving all your data to these cloud providers just seems too big to me, and I think they're going to start charging insane amounts when they need to show a profit.

On an aside I tested docling by giving it the Ronin TTRPG rulebook PDF and it did an astounding job of converting it all into .txt and .md. Given the wild graphic design of the book that's pretty astounding. Next we'll see if it can read the other Borg books like Mörk Borg and Cy Borg, which are also famous for their messy information.

  "provider": {
    "alibaba-token-plan": {
      "models": {
        "qwen3.8-max-preview": {
          "limit": {
            "context": 1048576,
            "output": 65536
          },
          "modalities": {
            "input": [
              "text"
            ],
            "output": [
              "text"
            ]
          },
          "name": "Qwen3.8 Max Preview"
        }
      }
    }
  }

Was there ever an explanation for why we never got the weights of 3.7? I would like sourced quotes and not weird/cringe accusative speculation about distillation, or your take on The Big D.

Looking forward to see what Antrophic and OpenAI does next.

Looks like they're previewing the model only on their subscription plan.

It boggles my mind how you can train a frontier model but not write a tweet without an obvious typo.

You can also try it out on Qwen chat, Its free.

That's a massive model!

The shift from "value" models to "intelligent, huge and slow" models coming from China is an interesting change in strategy.

My main issue with GLM 5.2 and Kimi 3 is that they're extremely token hungry and thus feel slow(er) to use.

I haven't tried Qwen 3.8 Max yet, looking forward to it. My hope is that its way less verbose. Another thing I experience with the Qwen models is that I do not trust their benchmark scores at all. Have anyone played with Qwen 3.8 Max and can share their experience? Which model it come close to? Sonnet 5? GLm-5? DS V4 Pro? Flash? Gemini 3.5 Flash?

Edit: I saw online they do in fact plan to release this openly at some point – x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2078759124914098291

"Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon! With a massive 2.4T parameters..."

https://trilogyai.substack.com/p/qwen-38-max-benchmark-how-i...

We are spoiled in the LLM segment, but I would love to see an open source competitor to Flux.2, etc.

We could point at a lot of factors on the US side. From political paralysis / head-in-the-sand attitudes towards emerging tech like green energy. To something of disdain for workers that will be impacted by AI (creating a backlash). To education that continues to lag. Add to this so many other self-inflicted economic wounds from the current administration.

I don't know if its nearly as terminal, as say the UK after WW2. The US is still large, wealthy, and resource rich. Yet at a minimum the triumphalism about US leadership after Trump was elected by the tech elite feels silly in retrospect.

Something I also think about is how much stronger The West overall would be if instead of antagonizing allies, there was a single ecosystem working closer together.

*within the scope of open models only

I have a feeling this is the next…frontier of that fight

One can only hope it eventually does as well as Linux

Made on the website, so not sure if on the API there's more thinking options...