The AI Wire ●

At its annual flagship conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said the company plans to train a new AI model at the scale of 5 to 10 trillion parameters — a major leap beyond its current Qwen3.8-Max, whose 2.4 trillion parameters make it the strongest of Alibaba's Qwen series. The announcement landed days before a Washington meeting between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump at which AI competition is expected to be a major topic.

Wu also unveiled the Zhenwu V900 AI chip, which Alibaba calls the most powerful AI chip in China, delivering three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890. Zhenwu chips power Alibaba's own data centers and its cloud clients.

Alibaba additionally said it aims for Alibaba Cloud's global data-center capacity to surpass 20 GW by 2032. The sweep comes as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been warning that China's AI development poses a threat to the US — one of the few Chinese-lab stories that clears the significance bar, given the sheer scale announced.

Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen-Image-2.1 on September 20, a downloadable model that combines image generation, multi-image editing, and native transparent output in one package. It has a 7-billion-parameter visual generation component built from 32 single-stream diffusion transformer layers, generates at native 2K resolution, accepts up to 10 reference images, and can return RGBA files with alpha channels — deciding from the prompt whether an output needs transparency.

The release folds Qwen-Image-Layered's transparency handling into the main model. Consequential license catch: the weights are research-only by default; commercial use requires a separate license from Qwen. (UPDATE Sept 21: the weights had initially gone out under Apache 2.0 before Alibaba quietly switched them to the research-only terms.)

Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate on September 19, a real-time simultaneous interpretation model covering 60 languages, with average lag down to 2.3 seconds (an ~18% cut from 2.8s) on the LAAL metric. It listens to live speech, optionally processes video frames, and returns translated text and speech while the speaker is still talking; it's available now as a hosted API on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio and QwenCloud under model ID qwen3.8-livetranslate-flash-realtime over WebSocket, with a Flash variant for offline audio/video translation.

Single-source so far (Complete AI Training); Alibaba's launch announcement is reportedly still marked draft while production docs list the model as available.

Qwen's first omni-modal model accepts text, images, audio, and video with 1M context and is built for agentic tool-calling workflows. API is $0.15 in / $0.47 out per million tokens, with audio input pricing cut roughly 98%. Live on QwenCloud, Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, and Qwen Studio; no open weights announced.