Alibaba has put a countdown clock on the first piece of Qwen4 — the weights open tonight at 23:00 in Beijing
A day after the model page appeared and was pulled, Qwen has confirmed the schedule: Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a multimodal mixture-of-experts model built on the next-generation Qwen4 architecture, opens at 23:00 Beijing time on 26 August in a standard and an FP8 version, on Hugging Face and ModelScope. The team's own framing is that this is a preview so the community can prepare for the full Qwen4 family, not a finished flagship. The figures circulating in Chinese tech press — 125 billion parameters plus 51 billion in n-gram embeddings, roughly 6 billion active per token, a training run about a ninth the cost of Qwen3.7-Plus — come from leaks rather than from Qwen, and no benchmark results have been published.
Why it mattersAlibaba is the only large lab still putting frontier-class weights out openly on a schedule, so an architecture preview from Qwen tells every open-source builder what the next year of cheap self-hosted models will look like. It also finally puts a date on the Qwen4 family, which has been the biggest unknown on the Chinese side since the spring.
Read in the app — free, in 9 languages
Related stories
Microsoft's new model answers only with a number, never a sentence.2026-10-10Shengshu's new video model charges 1.4 cents a second.
2026-10-09OpenAI's cheap model now has a mode costing six times more.
2026-10-09Perplexity's small model can search an index its big model built.
2026-10-09Anthropic's new small model costs 90% less than last year's.
2026-10-08