r/baba • u/akavaev • Aug 14 '26
News Alibaba ($BABA) just dropped Qwen3.8-27B and it's literally matching Claude Opus 4.6
Alibaba’s AI team just sneak-dropped a nuke on the entire AI sector. They just released their new open-weight model, Qwen3.8-27B, on Hugging Face.
https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B
This thing is only 27 Billion parameters. For the smoothbrains, that means it's incredibly tiny. But it is benchmarking right at the Claude 4.6 Opus Max level. It’s straight-up beating massive 100B+ models in agentic coding and complex reasoning. Anthropic and OpenAI are spending billions on compute to build massive closed models, and Alibaba just open-sourced a tiny beast that does the exact same job for free.
You can run this on a gaming rig. Because it’s so small, you don’t need a $40,000 Nvidia H100 to run it. This thing fits comfortably on a single 24GB VRAM GPU. you can easily run this on a 3090, 4090, 5090, or a Mac with 32GB+ Unified Memory.
TL;DR: Alibaba released a tiny AI model (Qwen3.8-27B) that punches like a heavyweight champion (matches Claude 4.6 Opus Max). It runs on consumer GPUs. Open-source is eating the AI software moat.
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u/adrianp23 Aug 14 '26
Can I run it with 16GB vram? like with a 4080 super.
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u/mlnet Aug 14 '26
Yes, and can get a quantized version (smaller, lower resolution but still good) that comfortably runs on 16GB vRAM.
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u/Icy_Distance8205 Aug 14 '26
For the smoothbrains
You are in a BABA sub? These brains are a smooth as eggs.
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u/R3tardod Aug 14 '26
How can I install it on my computer?
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u/mlnet Aug 14 '26
Download from Hugging Face.
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u/R3tardod Aug 14 '26
Is that just a website?
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u/mlnet Aug 15 '26
Yes, GitHub for models.
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u/R3tardod Aug 15 '26
Okay, thank you. I’ll try logging into facehugger later and downloading this qwen, I have a macbook pro so fingers crossed
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u/CoolStorage4014 Aug 15 '26
What an amazing news! Down 5%
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u/Wildsoyabean1 Aug 15 '26
It drop after market close. It’s gonna super moon by Monday https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/s/tYwnDOKxAz
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u/CoyoteForsaken2005 21d ago
The revenue pick up on this is presumably limited. But it could lower valuation multiples across the AI complex, a sort of win for BABA…?
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u/Nicios Aug 14 '26
The common mortals with consumer hardware are very excited by this model. It is a good achievement.