GoKawiilA man walks past the Alibaba logo displayed at its booth during the China International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing, China July 16, 2025.
Meta wants to lead in open-source AI. China's Alibaba just reminded the U.S. tech giant how competitive the market is.
On Monday, the Chinese tech giant launched an AI model, designed to run on consumer hardware like laptops — a new battleground for AI model developers — and opened the weights of its most powerful model as it looks to maintain its lead in open-source technology.
It comes after Meta announced plans last week to open-source its most powerful AI model and launch new ones designed to run on laptops, in a bid to establish itself as the U.S. alternative to Chinese technology, over frontier labs OpenAI and Anthropic, which use a more proprietary approach.
Launching its new model, Alibaba said Qwen3.8-27B had "excellent capabilities" in handling coding, professional work, research, and long-horizon agentic tasks. It added it matches the performance of another model that is ten times its size.
Alibaba also said it released the weights — calculations and rules that determine how the AI works and behaves — of Qwen3.8 Max, its most powerful model, meaning it can be freely downloaded and run. But the data and methods used to train that model may not be revealed.
Alibaba has established itself as the leader in open-weight AI, with other Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Moonshot also strong players.