Media365
A technical innovation has allowed Alibaba Group Holding, one of the leading players in China’s artificial intelligence boom, to develop a new generation of foundation models that match the strong performance of larger predecessors while being significantly smaller and more cost efficient.
Despite its compact size, Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B is among Alibaba’s best models to date, according to developers. The key lies in its efficiency: the model is said to perform 10 times faster in some tasks than the preceding Qwen3-32B released in April, while achieving a 90 per cent reduction in training costs.
Emad Mostaque, co-founder of the UK-based start-up Stability AI, said on X that Alibaba’s new model outperformed “pretty much any model from last year” despite an estimated training cost of less than US$500,000.
For comparison, training Google’s Gemini Ultra, released in February 2024, cost an estimated US$191 million, according to Stanford University’s AI Index.
