Alibaba has launched an AI model, Qwen3.8-27B, designed to run on consumer hardware like laptops. Concurrently, it released the weights of its most powerful model, Qwen3.8 Max, allowing free download and use. This move intensifies its competition with Meta in the open-weight AI market, where Alibaba aims to maintain its leadership. The company stated that Qwen3.8-27B demonstrates strong capabilities in coding, professional work, research, and long-horizon agentic tasks, matching the performance of models ten times its size. According to Hugging Face, Qwen-based models currently account for 151,448 derivatives, which is 2.6 times Meta's total footprint.