China challenges US model makers with open model push amid AI race
Alibaba's Qwen 3.8-Max challenges US tech dominance with competitive pricing and performance. The AI race heats up as China enters the open model arena.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has launched Qwen 3.8-Max, a 2.4 trillion-parameter model, questioning the technological lead of the US. This comes shortly after the DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731, which performs closely to OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna at a lower cost. Chinese developers are now competing on both price and performance against their American counterparts.