Alibaba Group Holding on Friday open-sourced its latest artificial intelligence model, built on the new Qwen3-Next architecture, which is 10 times more powerful but costs only a 10th to build compared to its predecessor.
The company’s Qwen team said it adopted an array of architectural innovations aimed at maximising performance while minimising computational costs, according to a note published on the developer platform GitHub.
The model is developed by Alibaba Cloud, the AI and cloud computing services unit of Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post.
Compared with its predecessor, Qwen3-32B, which was released in April as part of the Qwen3 family, the new model – Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B, with 80 billion parameters – cost about a 10th as much to train and performed 10 times faster than its predecessor in certain tasks, the team said in a separate note published on Hugging Face, where it has uploaded the new model.
It also matched the performance of the company’s flagship model Qwen3-235B-A22B, Alibaba Cloud said in a statement, adding that the new models are optimised for efficient deployment and operation on consumer-grade hardware.
The new model reflected how Alibaba Cloud and other mainland AI firms are continuing to narrow the gap with their US peers through the open-source approach, which makes the source code of AI models available for third-party developers to use, modify and distribute.
