Alibaba previews Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4T multimodal model priced at about one-tenth of Fable 5

ugcfast · reddit · 2026-07-21

Alibaba previewed Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4T-parameter multimodal model that the company says is second only to Anthropic’s Fable 5 on internal evaluations.

Why it drew attention

Alibaba is pitching the model at roughly one-tenth the price of Fable 5:
Fable 5: $10 in / $50 out per million tokens
Qwen3.8-Max standard: about $1.70 in / $5.10 out
Preview promo: $0.17 in / $0.51 out
The claim is currently Alibaba’s own internal-eval statement.
No benchmark table, model card, or license has been published yet.
Open weights are said to be coming soon, but without a date.
The post contrasts this with Kimi K3, which shipped two days earlier with open weights available now and strong third-party arena results.

The core question in the thread is whether a self-reported #2 model without public benchmarks really matters, or whether the more open and benchmarked Kimi release is the more important story.

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Alibaba previews Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4T multimodal model priced at about one-tenth of Fable 5

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