alt Hacker NewsQwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork
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> Today, we are officially releasing Qwen 3.8-Max, the most capable model in the Qwen family to date. This also marks the first time we will open-source the weights of a Qwen-Max-class model — the open weights will be released next week.
I don't understand. That's dated today, but:
https://twitter.com/alibaba_qwen/status/2078759124914098291
> Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon! [...] You don't have to wait to test it. Just now, the Qwen3.8-Max-Preview made its debut on Alibaba’s Token Plan, Qoder, and QoderWork.
That was on July 19th. I used it to draw this pelican: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/20/afraid-of-chinese-mode...
So what are they releasing today?
Does the page actually load for anyone? I get stupid spa skeleton spinners.
Once OpenAI and Anthropic are public, every such announcement will become a reliable sell signal
Can a model be stripped off anything not relevant to coding and get a lot lighter? Or is that impossible?
Just like we have professors with specialisation wondering if AI models can also be so.
It seems this is the only mention of cost?
> Qwen3.8-Max comes with the official support for reasoning_effort, which can be used to adjust reasoning depth and control cost:
> xhigh (default): for complex tasks demanding thorough analysis
> medium: balancing accuracy and speed
> low: efficient reasoning optimizing for speed and cost
I hope this is significantly cheaper. I've been loving Deepseek for it's nearly free usage costs, hard to justify switching from cents per day.
> This also marks the first time we will open-source the weights of a Qwen-Max-class model — the open weights will be released next week.
Nice!
Lmao I love their video with the idea that people will be able to do their hobbies while ai does their job.
Surely Alibaba is leading by example here by reducing work hours per week while keeping pay the same right? Right?
the benchmark I trust most is whether the model can explain its own pricing page without getting confused
> In this case, Qwen3.8-Max was asked to create the oh-my-cli project from scratch and, over a 10+ day long-horizon autonomous coding run, build a self-evolving harness.
They don't explain how successful that went but it's a bit hilarious seen that an Anthropic dev explained that it's been 15 days Claude was hard at work --with nothing to show yet-- trying to rewrite itself in another language.
"You rewrite Claude Code, we rewrite oh-my-pi."
"You're nowhere after 15 days, we do it in 10."
Sure, it's apples to oranges and all that. But part of me thinks they know fully well what they did there.
We will eventually need a self evolution benchmark to see where these large models can create recursive solutions that improve
“self-evolves through feedback loops”
Does this mean they distilled Claude? Sounds like what Claude Code will often do.
Are these latest Qwen models still open weights or has Qwen moved away from that?
They've also announced Qwen3.8-27B being released open-weight next week. Qwen3.6-27B is widely regarded as one of the best local models, especially since nothing else comes close to it, that isn't benchmaxxed, without being significantly larger. If 3.8 truly improves upon it that would be awesome.