Alibaba shipped qwen3.8-omni-flash on september 18, one model taking text, image, audio, and video…
alibaba shipped qwen3.8-omni-flash on september 18, one model taking text, image, audio, and video inside a 1 million token window, with audio input priced over 98 percent lower and agent benchmarks up 19.5 points. omni-modal used to be a premium feature, now it is the entry tier.
the question is which capability keeps a price at all.
Context
Alibaba Cloud's post dated 20 September 2026 says it is launching Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash with a 1M-token context, and that across 29 evaluations its average score improves by more than 25% over Qwen3.5-Omni-Plus, while the API price per hour of audio input falls by more than 98% and per hour of audio-visual input by more than 93%. Its footnote says hourly prices are estimated as 30 times the input cost of two minutes of source material, with audio-visual input at 720p and 1 fps.
These are Alibaba's own figures against its predecessor, not against other vendors, and not independent. The agent benchmark gain of 19.5 points was not found in the page read. A secondary source, packetnebula, says the model is API-only with no weights and priced at 0.15 dollars per million input tokens; that is not first-party. Dates differ by source: the Alibaba post is 20 September, an earlier note's source gave 18 September, and packetnebula says 17 September. Evaluation counts also differ between sources, so they are not merged. Omni-modal moving from premium to entry tier is the author's opinion.
Related work
- Earlier note on the same release ↗Same Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash launch.
Watch next
- Alibaba's dated price page and independent benchmarks.
Sources
- Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash (Alibaba Cloud, 20 Sep 2026)alibabacloud.com
- Qwen 3.8 Omni Flash (packetnebula, 18 Sep 2026)packetnebula.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 19 September 2026 at 00:40 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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