Qwen3.5 is 60pc cheaper to use and eight times better at processing large workloads than its predecessor, the company said.
Alibaba has unveiled its latest AI model, Qwen3.5, as newer launches from Chinese companies catch up to their US counterparts in the race for AI dominance.
The first open weight model in the Qwen3.5 series demonstrates “outstanding results across a full 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 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 releasing an upgraded version of its Doubao chatbot app over the weekend. The agentic chatbot service has close to 200m users.
The TikTok parent also recently launched the latest version of its AI video generator, Seedance 2.0, which garnered praise for its capability 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.
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