Alibaba (BABA) Stock: Qwen Just Made a Powerful AI Model for a Fraction of the Cost

TLDR

• Alibaba’s Qwen released Qwen3.8-Flash, a new multimodal AI model with improved coding and office-task performance
• The model costs roughly one-ninth of the training cost compared to Qwen3.7-Plus
• Qwen3.8-Flash supports a default context window of 262,144 tokens, expandable to 1 million tokens
• Alibaba also open-sourced Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, which previews the architecture for the upcoming Qwen4 model family
• The launch follows Alibaba’s HK$80 billion share sale and Jack Ma buying over HK$600 million in company stock

Alibaba (BABA) released a new AI model on Wednesday called Qwen3.8-Flash through its Qwen AI division. The model is designed to handle coding and office tasks more efficiently than its predecessor.

Alibaba Group Holding Limited, BABA

Compared to the Qwen3.7-Plus model, Qwen3.8-Flash requires about one-ninth of the training cost. Despite the lower cost, Alibaba says it delivers better performance across coding and office-related tasks.

The model is priced at 0.16 USD per million input tokens and 0.47 USD per million output tokens via API. In Chinese yuan terms, that works out to 1 yuan per million input tokens and 3 yuan per million output tokens.

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