Alibaba Qwen Open Sources 6B Active Model as First Preview of Qwen4 Architecture

The company released its multimodal Qwen3.8-Flash model on OpenRouter and Qwen Cloud alongside the launch of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next. The open-weight Flash-Next model uses a mixture-of-experts design with 125B parameters, though only 6B are active per token. It incorporates 51B N-gram side parameters and utilizes a hybrid attention mechanism and the Muon optimizer to reduce compute costs.

Qwen reported that Flash-Next outperforms DeepSeek-V4-Flash on coding and agent benchmarks despite having roughly half the active parameters. The model's API on Qwen Cloud is priced at $0.15 per 1M input tokens and $0.47 per 1M output tokens. This early release allows inference frameworks such as vLLM and SGLang to adapt to the new architecture before the formal Qwen4 launch.