Every week, I organize 400 to 700 links into roughly 60 categories as part of my ongoing effort to learn about AI. This is my personal notebook, which I enjoy sharing with friends… a hobby and a labor of love, rather than a commercial publication or product.
If you arrived here through a search or shared link, this page collects the links I found for Qwen for the week ending September 4, 2026.
As part of my learning process, I like to automate the category covers. It gives me a chance to learn Python and APIs.
This week’s cover prompt was written using Claude Opus 4.7, and the image was generated using Nano Banana 2.1.
Category Cover Image Prompt: A psychedelic screen-printed gig poster of a meditating panda strumming a sitar-guitar at center, bamboo stalks and leaves swirling outward into op-art mandalas with a harvest moon vinyl record behind, bold hand-lettered Fillmore-era title reading Qwen arching across the top, in electric magenta, acid orange, deep teal, and lime green on cream paper with visible ink registration offset and intricate linework border.
This Week in Qwen News
Summary by Claude Sonnet 5.5 based on this week’s links:
- Max-0902 takes the WebDev top spot: Alibaba announced Qwen3.8-Max-0902, a 2.4T-parameter, 1M-context upgrade further post-trained on coding and cowork tasks. Arena reported it debuting at #1 in Code Arena: WebDev with 1691 points, 3 above Claude Opus 5 (Max), at a blended $5 per million tokens.
- Flash line gets mixed reports: Qwen3.8-Flash is a 125B MoE with about 6B active parameters, described as roughly 20x cheaper and 2x faster than Max. Arena put Flash-Next at #24 overall and #7 among open models in Agent Arena, while one user said it lost track of multi-turn conversations at FP8.
- Local running and long-horizon testing: Hermes added a local backend with Unsloth quants for Qwen3.8 models. One user's lesson: use a BF16 kv cache instead of turboquant, and offload it to CPU if VRAM is tight. The Qwen team's E-Commerce Bench, a simulated 365-day store-running test of 18 frontier models, drew praise as a long-session agent eval.
This summary was generated by Claude Sonnet 5.5 to help you explore the links below. Rest assured, I select, organize, and check the links by hand in Google Sheets, and write the introduction and personal commentary in The Main Newsletters myself each week as a labor of love.
This week's links related to Qwen
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next by @Alibaba_Qwen has landed in Agent Arena, ranking #7 among open models (#24 overall) with +2.4% net improvement across 8.7K+ real-world agentic sessions! Among open models, it sits just behind DeepSeek V4 Flash (High) at #6 (+3% net improvement) and two
https://x.com/arena/status/2094566204488962483
🏆 #1 on CodeArena: WebDev leaderboard. Qwen3.8-Max-0902 jumps from 1669 to 1691, setting a new record for agentic coding (WebDev) workflows, with standout strength in multistep reasoning, tool use, and full app generation. Thanks for the recognition! @arena
https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2094976556494209206
Banger paper from the Qwen team. If you evaluate agents on anything longer than a single session, this one is worth your time. (bookmark it) E-Commerce Bench runs an agent through a simulated 365-day year operating several online stores at once. 18 frontier models are scored
https://x.com/dair_ai/status/2094872928240447665
Hermes now has a local backend! There’s support for Unsloth UD-Q4_K_XL and UD-Q4_K_M quants for DeepSeek-V4-Flash, Qwen3.8-27B, 3.6-35B-A3B and Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in Hermes!
https://x.com/danielhanchen/status/2095623899979600152
Big news: Qwen3.8-Max-0902 by @Alibaba_Qwen just debuted at #1 overall in the Code Arena: WebDev with 1691 pts! It scores 3 pts above Claude Opus 5 (Max), 17 pts above Kimi K3 (Max), and 22 pts above the previous Qwen3.8-Max. Priced at a blended $5/MToken, Qwen3.8-Max-0902 also
https://x.com/arena/status/2094974637704913198
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next is #24 overall with +2.4% net improvement (#7 among open), and by signal: – Confirmed Success: +12.3% – Bash Recovery: +2.9% – Praise vs. Complaint: -1.6% – Steerability: -1.1% – No issues with Tool Hallucination
https://x.com/arena/status/2094566207794061800
🚀Qwen3.8-Max just got upgraded. Meet Qwen3.8-Max-0902! 2.4T parameters. 1M context tokens. Built for real world complexity. Further post trained on Coding & Cowork, Qwen3.8-Max-0902 now delivers stronger performance across complex enterprise tasks, scientific research, and
https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2094968708288680276
LESSON LEARNED: Always use BF16 kv cache. I was using turboquant. Yeah the VRAM consumption sucks – so another trick is to CPU Offload the kv cache. Implemented in SlimServe for 3090 and Qwen (it requires extensive testing to get it right) I have further work to universalize
https://x.com/QuixiAI/status/2093405502181179422
125B/6B, 1M context, multimodal, now in OpenCode Go. ⚡ Happy coding with Qwen3.8-Flash!
https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2093227357951897687
My experience with Qwen3.8-Flash-Next is that it can’t even keep track of a multi-turn conversation. It answers questions I asked 2 turns ago. This is at FP8
https://x.com/QuixiAI/status/2093175458569326919
Qwen3.8 Flash is the third Qwen3.8 release, after Max and 27B it uses a 125B MoE architecture with only ~6B parameters active per token Flash is ~20x cheaper and ~2x faster than Qwen3.8 Max, often delivering performance close to Max hosted version comes with a 1M token context
https://x.com/skalskip92/status/2093384847649571325
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