alt Hacker NewsI assume that this announcement has been prompted by that of Moonshot AI, which has just announced a 2.8T parameter open-weights LLM, Kimi K3, to be published on Huggingface by 27 July.
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.
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On social media in China there is an oft-repeated joke that goes something like this: In other countries, governments intervene to prevent anti-competitive behaviour; here (in China), they intervene to curb competition.
It's being announced right now because the World AI Conference is ongoing. Robots are boxing and major Chinese AI firms are releasing their newest models. Also the formation of WAICO was just announced by Xi Jinping
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Artificial_Intelligence_...
I would rather see them releasing 3.7-27B, 3.7-122B or their 3.8 versions. Qwen/QwQ were always about the best available local inference at home.
It's important to note there was recently a large AI conference in Shanghai, and Xi Jinping mentioned a commitment to open source AI releases. It is no surprise that Alibaba would want to align.
It’s tempting to associate both events, but when a sector is strung up like RL (representation learning) is right now, we’re bound to see things appearing at the same time. It happens a lot in frontier research, some people even publishing identical claims, independently, with just hours or days between them
I just hope that they’ll soon also have like 35B or 80B (like the older Qwen3 Next or thereabout) MoE models that can be run locally.
Like, throw us a bone, we all know we need SOTA for lots of dev work anyways, but at least some tasks can be local.
Or it was prompted by the fact Xi Jinping was at the 'World AI Conference' launching a political alliance and saying things like “AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation” https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/17/x-china-ai-summit-risks-secu...
Big conferences often come with a flurry of new releases and announcements.
> In any case, from this competition in LLMs, we win.
Do we really though? Everyone is wasting resources doing almost exactly the same thing. Climate loses, we lose.
Not directly, relevant, but Alibaba (maker of Qwen) actually owns about ~20-30% of MoonshotAI (the maker of Kimi K3).
GLM5.2 being released is also likely a factor
And the Kimi release was probably prompted by the Inkling announcement. Excited for Chinese labs to copy those capabilities over as well!
Wondering how much the operations in China are orchestrated by the central government vs. free competition. Anyone with more insights on this?
I think there's more to it.
China will always benefit from a broader adoption of their models as hidden propaganda machines.
Eventually with several services relying in those tools, their answers will always be more friendly to China.
They did not want to get brutally weightmogged
Xi Jinping openly talked about open source at WAIC. So don't think the labs have much a choice now...
Dont forget the following:
- Minimax M3 Pro (2.7T)
- GLM 5.3 (or beyond)
- Deepseek V4 Pro (current V4 Pro is preview)
- Kimi K3 weights out in 8 days
Exciting time on the open-weights frontier.
These things take months to train. No chance this is a reaction to what just happened.
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It's hard to say what their motivation is. The Chinese firms seem to be working hard to commoditize intelligence which may be the most effective way to debase American frontier labs. And yeah: it also happens to be really good for humanity.