Alibaba launches Qwen3.5 AI model with visual agentic capabilities and 60% cost reduction

Alibaba unveils Qwen3.5 with visual agentic abilities

Qwen3.5 is 60pc cheaper to use and eight times better at processing large workloads, the company said. Alibaba has unveiled its latest AI model called Qwen3.5, as newer launches from Chinese companies catch up to their US counterparts in the race for AI dominance. The first model in the open-weight Qwen3.5 series demonstrates "outstanding results across a range of benchmarks", the company said. It ranks higher than OpenAI's GPT-5.2, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 and Google's Gemini 3 Pro in several of the tests. The model is built on a hybrid architecture that allows only 17bn parameters to activate per forward pass, while comprising of a total of 397bn parameters. This, Alibaba said, optimises speed without sacrificing its capability. According to the company, Qwen3.5 is 60pc cheaper to use and eight times better at processing large workloads than its immediate predecessor. The new model comes with "visual agentic capabilities", Alibaba said - the ability to take actions across phone and computer apps. "Built for the agentic AI era, Qwen3.5 is designed to help developers and enterprises move faster and do more with the same compute, setting a new benchmark for capability per unit of inference cost," the company said in a statement as reported by Reuters. Alibaba's latest launch follows ByteDance, which released an upgraded version of its Doubao chatbot app over the weekend. The agentic chatbot service has close to 200m users. The TikTok-parent also launched the latest version of its AI video generator called Seedance 2.0, which garnered praise for its ability while also receiving criticism for potential copyright theft. Other Chinese AI leaders launched their own new models recently, including Zhipu, which unveiled GLM-5, trained entirely using Chinese chips, MiniMax, which released M2.5, and the Alibaba-backed Moonshot AI, which came out with Kimi K2.5. These new launches come ahead of DeepSeek's new V4 model, expected to come out later this month. According to reports, the new DeepSeek model could outperform rivals ChatGPT and Claude, particularly on tasks that involve long coding prompts. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Alibaba introduces new AI model Qwen3.5 for agentic era

On Monday, Alibaba (BABA) unveiled a new AI model called Qwen3.5, aimed at executing complex tasks independently, with improvements in performance and cost. The Chinese ecommerce giant said that in various task evaluations, the 3.5 series consistently demonstrates performance on par Alibaba claims Qwen3.5 matches or exceeds leading models in versatility and performance according to published benchmarks. Qwen3.5 enables up to 60% reduction in deployment costs while maintaining high performance, making it more cost-efficient for developers and enterprises. Qwen3.5 is introduced amid fierce competition in China, positioning Alibaba as a top AI innovator though competitors like ByteDance and DeepSeek are rapidly advancing as well.