Alibaba Qwen releases Qwen3.8-Flash and open-weight Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

Alibaba’s Qwen team launched the multimodal Qwen3.8-Flash model with improved coding and office-task performance at substantially lower training cost than its predecessor, alongside open weights for Qwen3.8-Flash-Next as an architectural preview of the forthcoming Qwen4 family. The production model is priced at approximately $0.15–0.16 per million input tokens. The release continues China’s rapid iteration of efficient open-weight and low-cost frontier-adjacent models.