ISTANBUL

Chinese tech giant Alibaba on Monday unveiled its next-generation open artificial intelligence (AI) model with big improvements in performance and cost in a move that could further heat up the global AI race between China and the US.

The flagship model, Qwen3.5, is designed to execute complex tasks independently, which, according to the tech giant, beats main US rival models on several benchmarks, South China Morning Post reported.

The Qwen3.5 was ​60% cheaper to use and eight times better at processing large workloads than its immediate predecessor, ​Alibaba said in a statement.

The new open-source model with 397 billion parameters showed significant improvement over the company’s previous flagship model, Qwen-3-Max-Thinking, despite the latter’s much larger size of over 1 trillion parameters.

It has added 82 new languages and dialects from the previous Qwen generation to support 201 languages and dialects.

The model, it added, also came with the ability to independently take actions across mobile and desktop apps, or what the company calls "visual agentic capabilities."

"Built for the agentic ​AI era, Qwen3.5 is designed to help developers and enterprises ⁠move faster ‌and do more with the same compute, setting a new ​benchmark for capability ​per unit of inference cost," the company said.

The much-anticipated release comes as Alibaba looks to attract more users to its Qwen chatbot app in China, a landscape currently dominated by rival tech ‌giant ByteDance's ⁠Doubao and ⁠DeepSeek.

Last year, ByteDance's ⁠Doubao and ⁠DeepSeek became the first Chinese AI firms to break through globally.

The rollout of Qwen3.5 could help further recent gains Alibaba has made in the cutthroat competition of AI models in China.

Last year, Alibaba was one ​of the first ​of DeepSeek's competitors to ⁠respond to the startup's viral rise, releasing Qwen 2.5-Max, which it claimed was superior to one of DeepSeek's hit models.