Alibaba Shipped a 2.4T Flagship and a 27B Model. The Small One Beat Meta’s 30B.

Qwen3.8-27B shipped on 14 August 2026 under Apache 2.0: dense, natively vision-language, 262K context, aimed at the 24GB consumer card. For two weeks beforehand the local-LLM community said this — not the 2.4-trillion-parameter flagship — was the release that mattered, and the model card says they were right. It also carries a hybrid linear-attention architecture that explains the context window…