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🌊 Alibaba floods market with Qwen3 model releases

Image source: Alibaba

The Rundown: Alibaba just released a barrage of new Qwen3 models this week, dropping six new variants across text, vision, audio, and safety — highlighted by the newly unveiled 1T parameter Qwen-Max.

The details:

Max shows near-frontier capabilities in coding and agentic tasks, while its Heavy version achieves perfect scores across math reasoning benchmarks.
Omni is capable of processing text, images, audio, and video, while supporting speech understanding in 19 languages and generation in 10 languages.
VL grades out as the top non-reasoning and open-source visual model, while also surpassing top closed models on a series of benchmarks.
Alibaba also released LiveTranslate-Flash for real-time interpretation, Guard models for safety moderation, and new upgraded Coder variants.

Why it matters: OAI, Anthropic, and Google have conditioned us to expect a slower release schedule, but Chinese giants like Alibaba are taking the opposite approach — with a rapid-fire pace that floods the market with near-frontier, specialized options. Qwen feels the closest a Chinese lab has been to the frontier since DeepSeek’s R1.

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