Alibaba Rushes Out Qwen3.8 Two Days After Kimi K3 Rattled Chip Stocks

Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Max-Preview two days after Moonshot's Kimi K3 shook chip stocks with lower pricing and claimed frontier performance. Alibaba claims comparable capability to leading frontier systems but relies on internal benchmarks, while promising (but not dating) an open-source release. If Chinese labs can sustain frontier performance at one-third the output token price, you're selling inference compute into a commoditising market. Kimi K3 proved the move works; Qwen3.8 proves it's spreading—once independent benchmarks confirm the claims and weights ship, US pricing collapses.