The company’s Qwen team said it adopted an array of architectural innovations aimed at maximising performance while minimising computational costs, according to a note published on the developer platform GitHub .
The model is developed by Alibaba Cloud, the AI and cloud computing services unit of Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post.
Compared with its predecessor, Qwen3-32B, which was released in April as part of the Qwen3 family , the new model – Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B, with 80 billion parameters – cost about a 10th as much to train and performed 10 times faster than its predecessor in certain tasks, the team said in a separate note published on Hugging Face, where it has uploaded the new model.
It also matched the performance of the company’s flagship model Qwen3-235B-A22B, Alibaba Cloud said in a statement, adding that the new models are optimised for efficient deployment and operation on consumer-grade hardware.
The new model reflected how Alibaba Cloud and other mainland AI firms are continuing to narrow the gap with their US peers through the open-source approach, which makes the source code of AI models available for third-party developers to use, modify and distribute.