Alibaba's Qwen launches Qwen3.8-Flash AI model with lower training costs

BEIJING, Aug 26 (Reuters) - ‌Alibaba's Qwen ​has ​released a new multimodal model, Qwen3.8-Flash, that delivers stronger coding and office-task performance ‌while cutting training costs, it said in ⁠a statement on Wednesday published on social media.

• As e-commerce ‌growth stagnates, AI has ‌become the biggest driver of revenue growth for the Chinese e-commerce and cloud computing giant.

• ​Its Qwen AI models are some of the most popular in China, where competition is ⁠intensifying in the sector.

• Qwen3.8-Flash supports a default context window of ​262,144 tokens, expandable to 1 million tokens, enabling it to handle large files, ​lengthy conversations and extensive research ‌materials.

• Compared with its previous Qwen3.7-Plus model, Alibaba said it requires about one-ninth ⁠of the training cost.

• Qwen said it would charge 1 yuan ($0.1488) per million input tokens and 3 ⁠yuan per million output tokens for access through its application ​programming interface.

• It also released open-source weights for Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, allowing the developer community to evaluate an architecture that ‌Qwen said would serve as a prototype for its next-generation Qwen4 model family.

• ‌On Sunday, Alibaba launched a heavily discounted HK$80-billion ⁠share sale to ‌fund its AI ​ambitions. ($1 = 6.7220 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Reporting by Shi Bu and Laurie Chen; editing by Barbara ‌Lewis)

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