Alibaba
Open-Source LLMs
About Alibaba
Alibaba's Qwen family has become the most widely downloaded open-weight model line in the world, passing three billion downloads in the six months to August 2026 and overtaking Meta and Google on that measure. More than 460 Qwen models have been open-sourced and the ecosystem has produced over 300,000 derivatives, which makes Alibaba the centre of gravity for open-weight AI in a way its Western equivalents are not. It also ships closed flagships: Qwen 3.8-Max launched 3 August 2026 with 2.4 trillion parameters and a one-million-token context.
Company History
Founded 1999 as an e-commerce marketplace; Alibaba Cloud followed in 2009 and became the platform for its AI work. The Qwen family shifted the company from fast follower to the leading publisher of open-weight models: 460+ models open-sourced, 300,000+ community derivatives, and more than 3 billion downloads in the six months ending 14 August 2026. Qwen 3.8-Max was previewed on 19 July 2026 and launched on 3 August 2026 at 2.4T parameters with a 1M-token context, priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output.
AI Models & Benchmarks
Closed flagship at 2.4 trillion parameters. Benchmarked competitively against the strongest models from Western labs.
The open-weight line behind 3 billion+ downloads and 300,000+ community derivatives.
Products & Services
Company Details
Focus Area
Open-Source LLMs
Stage
Founded
1999
Headquarters
Hangzhou, China
Key People
- Eddie Wu (CEO)
- Joseph Tsai (Chairman)