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 August 7, 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 Gemini 3.1 Flash Image Preview.
Category Cover Image Prompt: A weathered Chinese stone lantern resting among reeds and smooth stones at the edge of a glassy black pond in a remote marsh at night, its silhouette perfectly mirrored in the still water beneath a vast field of stars, painted in fine-art nocturne style with deep indigo sky, silver starlight, muted marsh greens and slate grays, a single faint warm glow on the distant horizon, the bold word Qwen set cleanly across the upper night sky in generous negative space.
This Week in Qwen News
Summary by Claude Sonnet 5.5 based on this week’s links:
- Qwen3.8-Max launch: Alibaba's Qwen team announced Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4T-parameter model it calls its most capable yet, and said open weights for it and a local Qwen3.8-27B would follow the next week. It quickly showed up in tools like Hermes Agent, Cline and Venice.
- Benchmarks and price: Vals AI reported Qwen 3.8 Max scoring 66.1 on its Index, tying Claude Opus 4.7 at about 2.3x lower cost per test. It also gained 8.6 points over Qwen 3.7 Max in roughly 2.5 months while getting cheaper.
- Mixed hands-on reactions: Arena placed it #4 on its Frontend Code leaderboard, behind Claude Opus 5 (Max) and Kimi K3 (Max). Ethan Mollick called it solid on his shader test but not at Kimi K3's level, and Jamin Ball argued the pricing gap versus other models is smaller than people claim.
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
It’s becoming increasingly necessary for Anthropic to release Fable 5.5. Not only because OpenAI is putting immense pressure on them. But also because China is constantly improving, and Qwen 3.8 has even surpassed Fable 5 in Terminal Bench.”
https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2084295475314729244
Qwen 3.8 Max and a new local 27B Qwen 3.8 is coming! Thanks @Alibaba_Qwen for featuring Hermes Agent in the release video!”
https://x.com/Teknium/status/2084140512777560537
@Teknium Thanks! Looking forward to seeing Qwen3.8-Max on Hermes Agent!”
https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2084230329553031299
Qwen 3.8-Max, the latest model from @Alibaba_Qwen, is now available in Hermes Agent at 20% off. > hermes update”
https://x.com/NousResearch/status/2084680562300862514
Qwen3.8-Max is available in Hermes Agent now! Let’s build! 🚀🚀”
https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2084683919937634507
📢Meet Qwen3.8-Max … our most capable model to date. Next week, the open weights of Qwen3.8-Max will be released, and Qwen3.8-27B is also going open-weights to meet you all!🎉 Qwen3.8-Max, a new bar for coding and cowork at 2.4T parameters: – Autonomous coding: 10+ days of”
https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2084100707423289643
Qwen3.8-Max is now available in ClinePass, a subscription for ~5x discounted access. Use it on Cline CLI w/ $4.99 special promo: npm i -g cline This is currently the most affordable way to access Qwen.”
https://x.com/cline/status/2084689818999718309
When VLMs process medical images, do they recognize organs and broken bones? Using Silico, I trained a J-Lens and created a visualizer exploring what Qwen-3.5 27B sees in each patch of an image. I found that Qwen can identify things like this harmful cyst on an OCT-scan!”
https://x.com/michaelwhanna/status/2084675176315474268
GLM-5.3 appears to be coming very soon. It’s time for OpenAI, and especially Anthropic, to step up their game and solidify their lead. China has recently made incredible strides with Kimi k3, Qwen 3.8, DeepSeek 4 Flash (fantastic!), and Minimax h3. The gap is shrinking. The US”
https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2084240554225770535
Big news: Qwen3.8-Max by @Alibaba_Qwen just landed at #4 on the Frontend Code Arena leaderboard with a score of 1,668! With 1,668 points, Qwen3.8-Max is trailing only Claude Opus 5 (Max) with 1,705 pts and Kimi K3 (Max) with 1,676 pts, on par with Claude Opus 5 (High) with 1669″
https://x.com/arena/status/2084108703729615026
The top three spots in front-end design are now shared between two Chinese and one Western model. Moonshots Kimi, Alibaba’s Qwen, and Anthropic’s Claude. China is no longer lagging behind but competing on equal footing. Crazy.”
https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2084215318990229972
It has a 1M token context window and 128k max output tokens. We ran it at 0.7 temperature with default Top P and Top K. Qwen 3.8 Max matches Claude Opus 4.7 on the Index (66.1 to 66.1) at about 2.3x lower cost per test: $2.68 versus $6.17.”
https://x.com/ValsAI/status/2084364170242519545
The leaps in capabilities are literally insane. Open Source Opus 4.8, according to DeepSWE Benchmark. The jump to Qwen 3.7 is simply insane.”
https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2084319130845315096
I found the original chart hard to grok, so here is a new representation I have not seen before. All highlighted cells (light red) are where the model got beat by Qwen 3.8-Max. Looks like Opus 4.8 is mostly subsumed by 3.8-Max.”
https://x.com/deliprao/status/2084133369391022587
Three neat pieces to this – Qwen 3.8 Max is SoTA on image recognition and labeling – Qwen 3.8 Max is likely really sample efficient – Qwen 3.8 Max can be perfectly OPD’d into Qwen 3.8 27B to achieve parity on specific tasks We can have Maven on a laptop… in the aggregate”
https://x.com/teortaxesTex/status/2084434943514443915
More exciting news from @Alibaba_Qwen: Qwen-Image-3.0-Pro has entered the Text-to-Image Arena at #5 with 1,263 pts! This is a strong improvement over Qwen-Image-2.0-Pro with 1,191 pts (#15 -> #5). Performance by category also improved substantially (see post below). Congrats”
https://x.com/arena/status/2084672571807846418
Qwen-Image-3.0-Pro has made a massive leap from the previous generation, now ranking #5 globally. Appreciate the recognition! We will keep building.🚀”
https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2084674586462007458
Qwen 3.8 Max ranks #2 among open weight models on the Vals Index, scoring 66.1 and placing #10 of 43 overall.”
https://x.com/ValsAI/status/2084364164655694236
The jump from its predecessor is steep. Qwen 3.7 Max scored 57.5, so 3.8 Max gained 8.6 points in about 2.5 months. It got cheaper doing it: $2.00/$6.00 per million tokens, down from $2.50/$7.50.”
https://x.com/ValsAI/status/2084364166362767808
New open weight model is out – Qwen 3.8 Max. Here’s how the “vanilla” pricing compares between the 3 recent open weight models and some frontier models. The delta is not nearly as stark as many people are making it seem. On top of that, the “vanilla” prices don’t take into”
https://x.com/jaminball/status/2084264107633729614
Qwen Team Exodus: 3 Key Leaders Leave Alibaba (2026)
https://modelfit.io/blog/qwen-team-exodus-alibaba/
Got sick of hand-tuning GPU kernels, so we built a compiler. Photon 2.0 compiles Moondream, Qwen 3.5, and Gemma 4 into megakernels: the entire forward pass in one GPU program.”
https://x.com/vikhyatk/status/2084409834523476073
Qwen-Image-3.0-Pro – QwenCloud
https://www.qwencloud.com/models/qwen-image-3.0-pro
Qwen 3.8 Max on my shader test. Basic impression after a bunch of experiments is that it is a solid model, but not Kimi K3 level in my experience so far.”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2084124237053219289
Ask anything, anonymously. Qwen3.8-Max has landed on Venice. Give it a try!”
https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2084280439909589230
Live in Command Code!🎉”
https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2084210646737100983
Qwen
https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.8
Qwen3.8-Max, better and cheaper. Try it out. 👀”
https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2084552484648042776
Qwen3.8-Max can be prompted with positive and negative boxes and use them to generate new detections super useful when concept we are looking for is difficult to describe with text 60% mAP when prompted with single box 80% mAP when prompted with multiple box ↓ more examples”
https://x.com/skalskip92/status/2084684945251844129
Yes, we will have Qwen3.8-Max.”
https://x.com/baseten/status/2084250438509969894
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