Who's who in AIAI glossary
Alibaba (Qwen)
Chinese e-commerce and cloud giant, whose AI lab develops Qwen, one of the most-downloaded families of open models in the world. Its computing power and talent pools make it a cornerstone of the Sino-American rivalry in AI.
In other words
Anthropic accuses it of the largest distillation attack ever recorded: nearly 29 million exchanges with Claude, via 25,000 fake accounts, to siphon off its expertise.
Alyriaz articles that mention it
- A single model for text, image, sound and video
Alibaba has released Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash, a model that natively handles multiple modalities with a one-million-token context window. We explain what omnimodality actually changes.
- Wan 3.0: the video model that accepts a spreadsheet as input
On 24 August, Alibaba widened access to Wan 3.0, which can generate thirty seconds of sound video in a single pass and accept documents as input. It is being compared to leading models, and we revisit the unfulfilled promise of openness.
- Qwen 3.8 in the 27-billion version: the open model that fits on a single card and sees images
Alibaba has released a 27-billion-parameter version of Qwen 3.8 under the Apache 2.0 licence, with built-in vision and a native context of 262,000 tokens. We explain why this size is the real point of interest.
- Gemma, Qwen: the wave of open models keeps rising
Google has announced a Gemma event for August 20, while Alibaba releases Qwen 3.8 weights. We take stock of the open ecosystem and what the community expects.
- Alibaba releases Qwen 3.8-Max, 2.4 trillion parameters, and promises to publish its weights
Alibaba launched Qwen 3.8-Max on 3 August 2026, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model aimed at code and collaborative work, with a weights release announced for the following week. We analyse what this release means in the race for openness.
- Stealing an AI without hacking anyone: the Alibaba case shaking up the AI world
Anthropic claims Alibaba used 25,000 fake accounts to query Claude nearly 29 million times and train its own Qwen model on the responses. Here's what distillation is, why it's nearly impossible to prevent, and why not everyone is convinced by the accusation.