Qwen 3.8 Flash
Qwen 3.8 Flash
A preview of the architecture behind Qwen 4, open, and priced at fifteen cents in.
Updated
The read
Qwen 3.8 Flash is Alibaba's fast tier and, in its open form as Flash-Next, a preview of the architecture Qwen 4 will be built on: 125 billion parameters with only six billion active per token. It reads text, images and video, takes a million tokens through the API, and scores level with much larger models on the independent index. The open weights carry Alibaba's community licence rather than Apache, so check the terms.
Where it shines
- Only six billion active parameters, so it is fast and cheap to serve
- Text, image and video input
- Fifteen cents per million input tokens on the API
Worth knowing first
- Community licence rather than Apache 2.0
- Described by Alibaba as an experimental preview
Index score
86.5
Provisional. This score is read from the product's public capability, not from the one-prompt rebuild the fully reviewed entries went through, so treat it as a placing rather than a verdict.
- Rank
- 15 of 73
- Builds
- LLMs
- Category
- Open weights
- Output
- Community-licensed weights, plus a very cheap API
- Pricing
- Free tier
- Best for
- High-volume multimodal work at a very low price
Scores are our own editorial judgement, weighted craft 55, speed 10, control 15 and value 20.
Also worth a look
Full index- 05GLM-5.3 FlashGLM-5.3 FlashProvisionalA fast, MIT-licensed open model that human voters rank beside the big flagships.Open weightsFree tier89.6
- 06Xiaomi MiMo V2.6 ProMiMo V2.6 ProProvisionalThe strongest large open-weights model on the independent index, under MIT, for under a dollar out.Open weightsFree tier89.4
- 07DeepSeek V4.1 FlashDeepSeek V4.1 FlashProvisionalFrontier-adjacent answers for thirty cents per million input tokens, with the weights under MIT.Open weightsFree tier88.3
