Alibaba will release Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next and preview the Qwen 4 architecture

The Alibaba Qwen team will release Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next on Wednesday, which is a mixture of experts (MoE) model with a total of 125 billion parameters, but only 6 billion parameters are activated for each token. The team positions it as a preview version of the next-generation Qwen 4 architecture, rather than the final flagship model.

The model is described as multimodal and is built on the upcoming Qwen 4 architecture. The team stated that the early release of this version is to prepare developers for the subsequent complete Qwen series. The model weights will be hosted on the Hugging Face and ModelScope platforms.

As of now, Qwen has not disclosed the benchmark results for this model, nor has it released comparative data with its own Qwen 3 series or overseas competitors. The specific figures of 125 billion and 6 billion parameters have not been officially confirmed. As an open-weight model, developers can download, fine-tune, and run it for free without sending data to a closed API, which helps reduce the cost of hosting the model.