Alibaba Introduces Next-Generation AI Model

2026-02-24 17:29:20

(MENAFN) Chinese technology powerhouse Alibaba launched its advanced open artificial intelligence model Monday, delivering substantial performance gains and cost reductions in a development poised to intensify the global AI competition between China and the U.S.

The flagship system, Qwen3.5, executes sophisticated tasks autonomously and surpasses leading American competitor models across multiple performance metrics, media reported.

Qwen3.5 operates at 60% lower cost while processing large-scale workloads eight times more efficiently than its direct predecessor, Alibaba announced.

The newly released open-source framework containing 397 billion parameters demonstrates marked advancement over the company’s prior flagship, Qwen-3-Max-Thinking, despite that model’s significantly larger architecture exceeding 1 trillion parameters.

Language support expanded by 82 new additions from the previous Qwen generation, now accommodating 201 languages and dialects.

The system additionally features autonomous operational capability across mobile and desktop applications—what the corporation terms “visual agentic capabilities.”

“Built for the agentic AI era, Qwen3.5 is designed to help developers and enterprises move faster and do more with the same compute, setting a new benchmark for capability per unit of inference cost,” the company stated.

The highly anticipated launch arrives as Alibaba seeks to expand its Qwen chatbot application’s user base within China, where rival technology conglomerate ByteDance’s Doubao and DeepSeek currently command market dominance.

ByteDance’s Doubao and DeepSeek achieved international breakthrough status last year as the first Chinese AI enterprises to gain global recognition.

Qwen3.5’s deployment could reinforce recent momentum Alibaba has secured in China’s fierce AI model competition.

Alibaba positioned itself among DeepSeek’s earliest challengers last year following the startup’s explosive popularity, introducing Qwen 2.5-Max with assertions of superiority over one of DeepSeek’s leading models.

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