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Alibaba releases next-generation Qwen3 model as AI rivalry intensifies

A variant of the new model is 10 times more powerful and can be built at a 10th of the cost of its predecessor, Qwen developers say

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Alibaba Cloud’s latest open-source AI model, the Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B, features 80 billion parameters. Photo: Shutterstock
Ben Jiangin Beijing
Alibaba Group Holding on Friday open-sourced its latest artificial intelligence model, built on the new Qwen3-Next architecture, which is 10 times more powerful but costs only a 10th to build compared to its predecessor.
The company’s Qwen team said it adopted an array of architectural innovations aimed at maximising performance while minimising computational costs, according to a note published on the developer platform GitHub.

The model is developed by Alibaba Cloud, the AI and cloud computing services unit of Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post.

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Compared with its predecessor, Qwen3-32B, which was released in April as part of the Qwen3 family, the new model – Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B, with 80 billion parameters – cost about a 10th as much to train and performed 10 times faster than its predecessor in certain tasks, the team said in a separate note published on Hugging Face, where it has uploaded the new model.

It also matched the performance of the company’s flagship model Qwen3-235B-A22B, Alibaba Cloud said in a statement, adding that the new models are optimised for efficient deployment and operation on consumer-grade hardware.

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The new model reflected how Alibaba Cloud and other mainland AI firms are continuing to narrow the gap with their US peers through the open-source approach, which makes the source code of AI models available for third-party developers to use, modify and distribute.

It also marked the latest example of how Hangzhou-based Alibaba Cloud has built Qwen into the world’s largest open-source AI ecosystem for developers.
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