Alibaba’s Qwen team has launched Qwen3-Coder, which it calls its “most agentic code model to date.” While it will be made available in multiple sizes, the most powerful variant — Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct — is being released first. The 480 billion parameter mixture-of-experts model has 35 billion active parameters supporting a context length of 256,000 tokens natively and 1 million tokens with extrapolation methods for “exceptional performance in both coding and agentic tasks,” explains the group, which claims the quasi-open source model has agentic coding, agentic browser use, and agentic tool use comparable to Anthropic’s proprietary Claude Sonnet 4. Continue reading Alibaba Is Rolling Out Its ‘Most Agentic Code Model to Date’

China’s Baidu has added AI and voice features to its Ernie search engine and as of June 30 officially made its generative Ernie large language model open source in a direct challenge to OpenAI and Anthropic as well as local Chinese rival DeepSeek. “This isn’t just a China story. Every time a major lab open-sources a powerful model, it raises the bar for the entire industry,” University of Southern California Associate Professor of Computer Science Sean Ren told CNBC. Baidu is also giving the Ernie mobile app more chatbot-like functionality, enabling it to help with drawing, writing and travel tasks. Continue reading Baidu Delivers AI Updates to Search, Open-Sources Ernie 4.5