Alibaba has launched its latest and most powerful Qwen 3 Max model for free, taking on the likes of Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT. The new model boasts one trillion parameters and was pretrained on 36 trillion tokens.
What is Qwen 3 Max?
Qwen-3 Max is the first model in Alibaba’s Qwen series of AI models to surpass one trillion parameters. It comes with a context length of one million tokens, which allows it to reason through entire codebases or lengthy documents.
The new Qwen model is said to offer improvements in reasoning, instruction following, multilingual support, and long-tail knowledge coverage. It is also said to deliver higher accuracy in math, coding, logic, and science-related tasks, along with the ability to more reliably understand instructions in English and Chinese.
Qwen vs ChatGPT vs Gemini vs Claude
Despite the Qwen 3-Max launch, Gemini 2.5 Pro continues to lead the text leaderboard on LMArena, a UC Berkeley-developed open-source platform that evaluates large language models (LLMs) across a variety of tasks. Qwen 3-Max ranks at the number 3 spot behind Gemini, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking, OpenAI’s o3, GPT-4o, GPT-4.5 preview, and GPT-5 high.
However, OpenAI’s GPT-5 chat, which is the standard model for answering queries on ChatGPT, falls behind Qwen-3 Max.
On the SWE-Bench Verified benchmark, which evaluates an AI model’s ability to solve real-world coding problems, Qwen-3 Max gets a score of 69.6. This is higher than the score of DeepSeek V3.1 non-thinking model but slightly lower than the score attained by Claude Opus 4 non-thinking.
In Tau2-Bench, a benchmark meant for evaluating agent tool-calling proficiency, Qwen 3-Max gets a score of 74.8, ahead of both Claude Opus 4 and DeepSeek V3.1.
Unlike other top models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, which are either hidden behind a paywall or have limited free access, Qwen 3-Max is available to use freely on the Qwen app and website. In fact, Qwen 3-Max is now the default language model for chats on the app or website.
While Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash Image AKA Nano Banana and ChatGPT’s image generator had become popular in the last few months, Qwen’s image editing capabilities usually go under the radar. The Chinese chatbot not only has a free image and video generator, but a separate “Qwen Image Edit” option that allows users to provide different effects to their images, change backgrounds, and remove objects via natural language prompts.
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