Qwen3 8B — Alibaba | Modeldex

Qwen3 8B

Active

Qwen3-8B is a dense 8.2B parameter causal language model from the Qwen3 series, designed for both reasoning-heavy tasks and efficient dialogue. It supports seamless switching between "thinking" mode for math,...

Updated 4 days agoStructured data from Modeldex catalog

Budget

Knowledge cutoff

Mar 31, 2025(1.1 years ago)

API release

Apr 28, 2025(12 months ago)

Not enough benchmark coverage yet for an Intelligence Index — needs at least 3 results across 2 categories.

Overview

History

Qwen3 8B became available via the Alibaba API on 2025-04-28.

Training & availability

Training data has a knowledge cutoff of 2025-03-31 — information about events after that date is unlikely to appear in the model's responses. Alibaba has not released the underlying model weights — access is via their hosted API only.

Capabilities

Context window: 40K tokens.
Input modalities: text.

Recommended for: cheap.

Limitations

The knowledge cutoff is 12 months old — this model will not know about recent events, releases, or API changes.
The context window (40K tokens) is modest by 2026 standards — unsuitable for processing long documents in a single request.
Text-only — cannot process images, audio, or video inputs.

Pricing

Input: $0.0500 per 1M tokens
Output: $0.4000 per 1M tokens

Use the cost calculator above to estimate monthly spend for your workload.

Quick start

Minimal example using the OpenRouter API. Copy, paste, replace the key.

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1",
    api_key="sk-or-...",
)
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="alibaba/qwen3-8b",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Explain quantum computing in one sentence."}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)

Cost calculator

Estimate your monthly bill. Presets are typical workload sizes.

Input tokens / month5.0M

@ $0.05/1M

Output tokens / month2.0M

@ $0.4/1M

Input cost

$0.25

5.0M × $0.05/1M

Output cost

$0.8

2.0M × $0.4/1M

Total / month

$1.05

$12.6 / year

Popularity

Signals from open-source communities — not a quality measure, but useful for gauging adoption among developers.

🤗

HuggingFace downloads

8.6M/ month

HuggingFace likes

1.0K

Integrations & tooling support

Tool calling: Not supported
Structured outputs: Not supported

Price vs quality

Budget pricing

Priced low — good for high-volume tasks. Quality tier pending more benchmark coverage.