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

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 ecommerce ‌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)