Alibaba's Tongyi Lab released Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS, a hosted text-to-speech model available in two tiers (Flash for real-time interaction and Plus for high quality) supporting 16 languages. The Plus variant ranks first on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard with an Elo rating near 1,236 and costs $27.59 per million characters. The model includes 86 fine-grained inline tags for controlling non-verbal details like laughter and breathing, but is available only as a hosted API rather than downloadable weights.
Simon Willison's Weblog·1 month ago·
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Ben Thompson proposes US legislation to establish data collection for model training as fair use and ban terms of service prohibiting model distillation, allowing open-source models to compete with Chinese alternatives. Alibaba released Qwen 3.8 Max as open weights after keeping Qwen 3.7 Max closed in May, possibly following Xi Jinping's recent remarks encouraging open-source development. The policy would indemnify AI labs while enabling wider innovation from collected training data and shift competitive dynamics in the global AI market.
Alibaba announced a preview of its Qwen3.8-Max model, which contains 2.4 trillion parameters and will be released as open-weight. The model represents a significant scale increase in Alibaba's Qwen lineup, positioning it as a major open-source AI model comparable to frontier closed models. The open release could expand access to large language models and increase competition in the open-source AI market.
A guide compares six open-weight language models optimized for running on a single 24GB GPU, including Qwen3.6-27B, Gemma 4 26B, Mistral Small 3.2 24B, and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B. These models range from 20B to 35B parameters and use Q4_K_M quantization to fit within memory constraints while leaving room for context and inference overhead. The strategy shifts from squeezing the largest 70B models onto a card to running right-sized 20B–35B dense or efficient mixture-of-experts models that decode faster and leave 1–6GB of headroom for context and serving stack overhead.
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