Alibaba's Qwen4 nears launch with teaser but no model released
The gist
Alibaba's Qwen team posted a teaser for Qwen4 but has published no model, price or license.
Developers on earlier open Qwen releases await whether Qwen4 stays open.
How it unfolded
- Aug 26, 2026Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, an open-weight 125 billion parameter model previewing the architecture behind the coming Qwen4 family, days after Alibaba raised $10.2 billion in Hong Kong to fund its AI buildout.
- Sep 22, 2026At the Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba announced Qwen4 had entered training, with parameter scale planned to expand to 5 trillion to 10 trillion; its press release gave no release date.
- Oct 28, 2026Code merged into Qwen Code, Alibaba's open-source coding agent, named qwen4-coder-plus, and the repo's tests used qwen4-omni-120b-think.
Key terms
- open-weight
- Numerical values in a neural network that determine how strongly inputs contribute to its calculations.
- ASI
- A hypothetical agent whose intelligence far surpasses that of the most gifted human minds.
Source: Wikipedia