Preview of Alibaba’s strongest AI model tops Chinese peers in ranking, lags US rivals

South China Morning PostCenter-RightEN 1 min read 100% complete by Coco FengMarch 20, 2026 at 08:00 AM

AI Summary

short article 1 min

Alibaba Group Holding has released a preview of its most advanced AI model, Qwen3.5-Max-Preview, aiming to compete with leading US AI developers. The model, part of the Qwen 3.5 family, is currently ranked as the top Chinese AI model on the Arena platform, a model performance community. While it holds the 15th global rank overall, Qwen3.5-Max-Preview demonstrates strong mathematical capabilities, placing fifth in that specific category. Alibaba plans to release the fully optimized model within the next two weeks. This release follows Alibaba's recent expansion of the Qwen 3.5 series, including models with large context windows and open-source options.

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Key Player Opposition Context

Zhejiang province 30% Hangzhou 30% UC Berkeley 40% South China Morning Post 40% OpenAI ×270% China 70% Anthropic ×370% Google ×270% Alibaba Group Holding ×590%

Keywords

artificial intelligence 100% ai model 90% qwen 3.5 80% model performance 70% ranking 60% context window 50% math capabilities 50% large language model 40% model comparison 40%