[AINews] Qwen 3.8 Max(2.4T) and 27B, new open weights models for Coding and Cowork

After the Qwen Exodus last year and new management took over launching more closed model APIs, there was some real doubt as to whether or not this leading open models lab would continue to release relevant models.That doubt is now gone. Qwen 3.8 Max is a MONSTER 2.4T model that would have been the top open model in the world but for the Kimi K3 release we already covered.Qwen offers them on API for $2 input/$6 output per million tokens, but they have promised to open-weight both models.Key Capabilities & Breakthrough HighlightsAutonomous Long-Horizon Coding:10+ Days Unattended Coding: Built a self-evolving coding harness from scratch over a multi-week autonomous run.Autonomous AI Research: Rebuilt a complete paper’s pipeline (Unified Data Selection for LLM Reasoning) from scratch, then autonomously ran an iterative research loop over 125 hours to invent a new data selection method beating the original paper’s benchmark by +2.71 points.Competitive Data Science: Competed against 526 human teams in the WWW2025 Multimodal Dialogue Intent Recognition Challenge, placing in the top 13% (outperforming 87% of human teams) within 24 hours.Autonomous Hardware & Chip Design:Executed a complete silicon design flow (GCD/RSA cryptographic accelerator) from RTL editing to simulation, synthesis, and physical layout.Reduced gate count from 8,298 to 678 gates while achieving an 81% die area reduction and meeting physical timing closure at 500 MHz.Deep Real-World Work & Operations:Demonstrated production-grade outputs across hundreds of professional workflows (e.g., corporate legal reviews, UI/UX design, structural engineering models, and automated ETF quant research).Outperformed competing models in the E-Commerce Bench (a 365-day store operation simulation), generating a 4.16x return (¥416,252 balance) through continuous game-theoretic negotiation and inventory planning.Multimodal Agents & Visual Feedback:Integrates native visual feedback across planning, coding, and GUI interaction, enabling direct application recreation across platforms (desktop, mobile, web).Released Qwen-MM-Plugins to extend multimodal capabilities to existing agent frameworks.A very nice win for open weights! On today’s pod with Baseten we talked about what it’s like to support these massive model drops on release.AI News for 7/25/2026-7/27/2026. We checked 12 subreddits, 544 Twitters and no further Discords. AINews’ website lets you search all past issues. As a reminder, AINews is now a section of Latent Space. You can opt in/out of email frequencies!AI Twitter RecapTop Story: Qwen 3.8 Max open model launchWhat happenedAlibaba Qwen announced Qwen3.8-Max as its new flagship and said open weights are coming next week.Alibaba introduced Qwen3.8-Max as its “most capable model to date,” describing it as a 2.4T-parameter model focused on coding, long-horizon agentic work, and multimodal reasoning, with the explicit claim that open weights will be released next week, alongside Qwen3.8-27B also going open-weight @Alibaba_QwenThe launch tweet also included API pricing: $2.00 / M input tokens, $6.00 / M output tokens, and $0.25 / M cached tokens @Alibaba_QwenAlibaba framed the model around several headline capabilities: 10+ days of autonomous coding, 500+ turns of chip design optimization, 365 days of e-commerce strategy, and native multimodal intelligence where vision is part of the execution loop rather than just an input channel @Alibaba_QwenThe company simultaneously pushed availability across its own surfaces and partners: Qwen Studio, API, Command Code, and later Venice; infra and app builders quickly confirmed support plans or integrations including Baseten, Hermes Agent, and Command Code @Alibaba_Qwen @Alibaba_Qwen @baseten @TekniumThe announcement landed as part of a broader pattern: multiple observers described it as evidence that the Chinese open-weight frontier is now competing directly with top Western closed models, espec