Alibaba's Qwen promises open weights for its top-tier model

Alibaba's Qwen team has announced Qwen 3.8-Max, which it describes as its most capable model so far. It also said it will open-source the weights of a Qwen-Max-class model for the first time, with the weights due the following week.

Separately, Qwen 3.8 Omni Flash, an open-weight multimodal model, was the highest-scoring ai post on Hacker News on 18 September.

The weights weren't out yet when this was announced, so the licence terms are still to be seen.

Why it matters

Open weights from a flagship tier, rather than a small or mid-sized model, shift the balance between open and closed ai. A model you can download and run is one you own instead of rent. One caution: open weights from large labs increasingly means self-hostable in a data centre, not runnable on a workstation.