Chinese technology giant Alibaba Group Holding has escalated the global AI race with the release of Qwen-3-Max-Preview, its largest and most powerful AI model to date. With over one trillion parameters, the new model places Alibaba in the elite club of companies, including OpenAI and Google DeepMind, that are pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence.
By The Numbers
- Model Size: 1+ Trillion Parameters
- Company Investment: $52 Billion in AI infrastructure over the next three years
- Pricing (Input): Starting at $0.861 per million tokens
- Pricing (Output): Starting at $3.441 per million tokens
Entering the Trillion-Parameter Club
The launch of Qwen-3-Max-Preview marks Alibaba’s entry into the trillion-parameter model arena, a significant milestone in AI development. Parameters are the variables that determine an AI’s skill and knowledge. Generally, a higher parameter count correlates with more powerful capabilities, allowing the model to handle more complex and nuanced tasks. This move positions Alibaba to compete directly with leading models like OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, which is estimated to have 5 to 7 trillion parameters.
Performance and Capabilities
According to Alibaba, the new text-only model shows substantial gains over its predecessors, with significant enhancements in Chinese-English text understanding, following complex instructions, and multilingual abilities. The company published preliminary scores suggesting the model has outperformed competitors such as MoonShot AI’s Kimi K2 and a version of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 on several industry benchmarks. An Alibaba AI engineer also noted on social media that a “thinking” version of the model is in development.
Availability and Pricing
Unlike many of the popular open-source models in its Qwen series, Qwen-3-Max-Preview is not being open-sourced. Instead, it is available as a premium offering through Alibaba’s official cloud services platform and the OpenRouter marketplace. Its pricing makes it one of the company’s most expensive models, signaling a strategy to monetize its most advanced AI technology directly.
About Alibaba’s AI Push
This launch is part of Alibaba’s aggressive AI strategy, backed by a massive $52 billion investment in AI infrastructure over the next three years. The company’s focus on AI is already yielding results, with AI-related products reporting triple-digit growth for eight consecutive quarters. While its new flagship model is proprietary, Alibaba’s open-source Qwen models have achieved immense popularity, with over 20 million downloads on the developer platform Hugging Face.
Looking Ahead
The release of another powerful, proprietary model from a major technology player intensifies the competition at the top tier of the AI industry. This trend is likely to accelerate innovation as companies race to achieve new performance breakthroughs. For the MENA region, the availability of another frontier model on a major cloud platform like Alibaba Cloud provides more options for startups and enterprises looking to build advanced AI applications, fostering a more competitive and diverse technology ecosystem.
Source: South China Morning Post
