Podcasts · Super Data Science: ML & AI Podcast with Jon Krohn
1018: Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max: Open-Weight Model Surpasses Most American Frontier Labs
· 13 min
Episode 1018: Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max: Open-Weight Model Surpasses Most American Frontier Labs
In Episode #1018, Jon Krohn breaks down Qwen3.8-Max, Alibaba’s enormous new flagship, a 2.4-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that, if its promised weights ship, becomes the largest open-weight release in history. Landing just weeks after Moonshot’s Kimi K3, it extends the price war and the open-weight surge Jon covered in Episode #1012. Alibaba positions it as second only to Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 / Mythos 5 and independent signals land in a similar neighborhood. Jon walks through its capabilities and multi-day agentic demos, its aggressive pricing ($2 in / $6 out per million tokens, with cached input eight times cheaper), and the question he gets asked most: are Chinese models safe to use? His answer hinges far less on the model than on how your data reach it.
Additional materials: www.superdatascience.com/1018
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