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The AI arms race reached a fever pitch on Monday after Chinese e-commerce and cloud provider Alibaba called into question America’s technological lead with the launch of Qwen 3.8-Max, a 2.4 trillion-parameter model that goes toe-to-toe with the best models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
The new model comes just days after the launch of DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731, which, according to independent benchmarks by Artificial Analysis, performs within a single point of OpenAI’s budget-friendly GPT-5.6 Luna while costing 40 percent less per task. What’s more, at just 284 billion parameters, it’s small enough to run on relatively modest enterprise servers and workstations.
Chinese model devs like Moonshot, Alibaba, and DeepSeek are now attacking their American counterparts on both price and performance. The pincer movement comes as US model devs like Anthropic and OpenAI stoke fears over the origins and safety of China-made AI models.
In a recent blog post, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei insisted he’s not opposed to open models, just ones made in China, ones distilled from proprietary models, and ones that do not meet rigorous safety metrics. In other words, anything that actually competes with Anthropic's own models.
The safety bit is particularly disingenuous, as the company’s fearmonger-in-chief has gone out of his way to stoke fears among US government officials. Proprietary models can be controlled, but open weights, once released in the wild, are impossible to claw back.
www.theregister.com
The new model comes just days after the launch of DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731, which, according to independent benchmarks by Artificial Analysis, performs within a single point of OpenAI’s budget-friendly GPT-5.6 Luna while costing 40 percent less per task. What’s more, at just 284 billion parameters, it’s small enough to run on relatively modest enterprise servers and workstations.
Chinese model devs like Moonshot, Alibaba, and DeepSeek are now attacking their American counterparts on both price and performance. The pincer movement comes as US model devs like Anthropic and OpenAI stoke fears over the origins and safety of China-made AI models.
In a recent blog post, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei insisted he’s not opposed to open models, just ones made in China, ones distilled from proprietary models, and ones that do not meet rigorous safety metrics. In other words, anything that actually competes with Anthropic's own models.
The safety bit is particularly disingenuous, as the company’s fearmonger-in-chief has gone out of his way to stoke fears among US government officials. Proprietary models can be controlled, but open weights, once released in the wild, are impossible to claw back.
China turns up the heat with open model blitz as US model makers panic
For the first time, Alibaba's Qwen team is letting its 'Max' model out of the API pen; meanwhile, DeepSeek V4-Flash gives new meaning to cheap and cheerful competition
