BEIJING, Sept 24 (Reuters) - Chinese e-commerce giant

Alibaba ( BABA ) announced on Wednesday its largest ever

artificial intelligence language model, the Qwen3-Max, doubling

down on AI as a core business strategy.

The model, Alibaba's ( BABA ) most powerful to date, contains more

than 1 trillion parameters, or variables that determine how an

AI system processes information, and shows particular strength

in code generation and autonomous agent capabilities, Zhou

Jingren, chief technology officer at Alibaba Cloud, said at the

company's annual conference.

Autonomous agent capabilities mean the AI system

requires fewer human prompts than a chatbot like ChatGPT, and

can make decisions and take action independently towards a goal

set by the human user.

Alibaba ( BABA ) cited third-party benchmarks, such as Tau2-Bench,

saying the model outperformed rival products including

Anthropic's Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1 in certain metrics.

Alibaba ( BABA ) has made AI a priority alongside its traditional

e-commerce operations. Earlier this year, the company announced

plans to invest 380 billion yuan ($53.40 billion) in AI-related

infrastructure over the next three years as competition to

develop advanced AI capabilities intensifies among Chinese tech

firms.

During the conference, Alibaba ( BABA ) CEO Eddie Wu said the company

would increase spending further, though he did not specify the

amount.

"The speed of AI industry development has far exceeded our

expectations, and the industry's demand for AI infrastructure

has also far exceeded our expectations," Wu said.

The company released the Qwen 3 model in April.

Alibaba ( BABA ) also unveiled several other AI products on

Wednesday, including Qwen3-Omni, a multimodal, immersive system

useful for virtual and artificial reality applications such as

smart glasses and intelligent cockpits.

($1 = 7.1157 Chinese yuan renminbi)