Alibaba has launched Qwen3-Max, its most powerful AI model to date, marking a significant step in the global AI race. Officially released in January 2025, this large language model (LLM) has over one trillion parameters and was pre-trained on 36 trillion tokens. Alibaba Cloud CTO Zhou Jingren stated that Qwen3-Max excels in code generation and autonomous agent capabilities.
Key Features and Capabilities
Qwen3-Max is designed for scalability and efficiency. It can process inputs as long as one million words or symbols, which is roughly the length of several books. The model utilizes a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, activating only specific subsets of the network during each pass. This design helps maintain steady performance and avoids crashes during training. New training methods, such as ChunkFlow, have tripled the system's speed when working with long inputs, and overall training efficiency has improved by 30% compared to previous Qwen models. Safeguards like SanityCheck and EasyCheckpoint have also reduced downtime from hardware failures.
The model excels in several key areas:
- Reasoning: Qwen3-Max demonstrates improved reasoning capabilities. An enhanced version, Qwen3-Max-Thinking, integrates code interpreters and employs parallel test-time computation techniques to achieve unprecedented reasoning capabilities.
- Instruction Following: The model is designed to precisely follow instructions, making it suitable for chatbot and writing applications.
- Multilingual Support: Qwen3-Max supports over 100 languages, enhancing its global applicability. It demonstrates strength in both English and Chinese.
- Coding: The model exhibits advanced code generation and debugging capabilities, making it a valuable tool for developers.
- Agentic Abilities: Qwen3-Max can take on tasks with fewer human prompts and work towards goals independently, moving beyond traditional chatbots. It can handle multi-step processes via Qwen-Agent tool calling.
Performance and Benchmarks
Qwen3-Max has achieved impressive results on various benchmarks:
- LMArena Text Leaderboard: A preview version of Qwen3-Max-Instruct ranked third globally, surpassing GPT-5-Chat.
- SWE-Bench Verified: The model scored 69.6, indicating strong performance in solving real-world programming problems.
- Tau2-Bench: Qwen3-Max achieved a score of 74.8, outperforming Claude Opus 4 and DeepSeek V3.1 in evaluating agent tool-calling proficiency.
- AIME 25 and HMMT: Qwen3-Max-Thinking, still in training, achieved 100% accuracy on these challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks.
Accessibility and Open Source
Qwen3-Max is available for use via the Qwen app and website. Developers can also access it through APIs on Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio. While Qwen3-Max is currently closed-source, Alibaba provides open-source model options like the Qwen3-2507 series. Alibaba has a history of open-sourcing its AI models, with the Qwen family having been downloaded over 600 million times and used to create over 170,000 derivative models.
Competition and Future Directions
Alibaba is positioning Qwen3-Max to compete with leading AI models such as OpenAI's GPT-5, Google's Gemini, and Anthropic's Claude. The company is investing heavily in AI and cloud infrastructure to become a central player in the global AI race. In addition to Qwen3-Max, Alibaba has unveiled other AI products, including Qwen3-Omni, a multimodal system for applications like smart glasses and intelligent cockpits. The company is also working on Qwen3-Max-Thinking, a reasoning-focused variant with an integrated code interpreter.
