Alibaba Unveils Trillion-Parameter AI Model: Qwen-3-Max-Preview

Alibaba releases trillion-parameter AI model to rival OpenAI, Google

The Hangzhou-based company released this new model from the Qwen3 series earlier in May this year. The series initially consisted of models ranging from 600 million to 235 billion parameters. Parameters are entities that decide how accurate an AI model is. However, the more parameters, the more energy and computing power are required to tune them and keep the system running. OpenAI's GPT-4.5 is known to be one of the world's biggest AI models, with an estimated parameter count of 5 to 7 trillion. The Qwen-3-Max-Preview model is a text-only model that outsmarted its best model, the Qwen3-235B-A22B-2507 released in July. Alibaba also released benchmark results indicating that Qwen-3-Max-Preview outperformed MoonShot AI's Kimi K2, a non-reasoning version of Anthropic's Claude Opus 4, and DeepSeek V3.1 across five tests. However, an official technical report did not back the findings. "Qwen3-Max-Preview shows substantial gains ... in overall capability, with significant enhancements in Chinese-English text understanding, complex instruction following, handling of subjective open-ended tasks, multilingual ability, and tool invocation. Scaling works - and the official release will surprise you even more," the company said.

Alibaba releases Qwen-3-Max-Preview, its largest AI model yet

Alibaba has released Qwen-3-Max-Preview, its most powerful artificial intelligence model so far. The model has over one trillion parameters, making it the largest system the company has built to date. The model is text-only and was made available on September 5, 2025, through Alibaba Cloud and the OpenRouter platform. Unlike some AI models, it is not open-source. Access is limited to official channels, which helps control how the model is used. According to Alibaba, Qwen-3-Max-Preview performs better than previous versions. Internal tests suggest it also outperforms many other models, though these results have not been verified independently. Users can access Qwen-3-Max-Preview through Alibaba's cloud services. The pricing is structured as follows: Model Studio activation is required to use the system, ensuring proper use and management of resources. Alibaba plans to invest $52 billion in AI infrastructure, research, and development over the next three years. This funding will support the development of new models, cloud services, and AI tools. The release of Qwen-3-Max-Preview and the investment plan show that Alibaba is expanding its AI capabilities and building infrastructure to support large-scale AI applications.