Alibaba’s lightweight Qwen model takes on larger AI systems from OpenAI, DeepSeek, Zhipu

Alibaba Group Holding’s new lightweight AI model Qwen3.8-27B has matched much larger near-frontier rivals while being able to run on everyday hardware, impressing developers as local AI gains momentum.

The Qwen3.8-27B, a small model with 27 billion parameters, performed on par with OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna, which was billed as the most cost-efficient model in the US lab’s latest flagship series, benchmark firm Artificial Analysis said on Monday.

It nearly matched leading open-weight models from Chinese firms, including DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813, released last week with 1.7 trillion parameters, and Zhipu’s 753-billion-parameter GLM-5.2 launched in June, according to the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.

OpenAI, which launched the GPT-5.6 family last month, does not disclose the parameter counts of its models.

The new findings came days after Alibaba released Qwen3.8-27B’s model weights – the underlying parameters that encode its intelligence – last Friday.

On Artificial Analysis’ Agentic Index, which measures models’ performance in AI agent-focused workflows, Alibaba’s small model outperformed GPT-5.6 series’ mid-tier model Terra and Anthropic’s powerful Claude Opus 4.8 released in May.