Alibaba’s four AI models could be your next edge
Alibaba owns four of the ten best-ranked Chinese models on LLMArena, and the market may be underpricing it
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Polymarket runs a pair of artificial intelligence markets every month. One asks which model sits on top of the leaderboard on a given day, and we covered the August 10 one last week. The other asks which Chinese company owns the best model, and that market now has $306,000 on it and settles at noon Eastern on August 31.
On the arena.ai leaderboard, two models answer the same question, a person picks the better answer without being told who wrote either one, and the votes make the ranking. There are 7,571,037 of them so far.
July was the busiest month Chinese AI has ever had. Moonshot released Kimi K3 on July 16 with 2.8 trillion parameters of open weights, the largest open model anybody has shipped. DeepSeek put out V4-Flash on July 31. Alibaba previewed Qwen3.8-Max in Shanghai on July 19 and released it this week at 2.4 trillion parameters with a million-token context window.
That's all great and all, but what about the rankings? Well, Qwen3.8-Max is 5th overall on 1496 points, above everything Google and OpenAI have on the board. Moonshot's kimi-k3-max is 17th on 1473. Alibaba also holds 14th and 18th, Baidu's ernie-5.1 is 21st, Z.ai has two models at 24 and 25, and DeepSeek's best is 37th, 45 points back.
Alibaba cost 68 cents a week ago. It costs 89 now, which pays about 12.4% in 27 days.
The question is whether anybody can catch it, and shipping a model is not enough. It has to get scored. Kimi K3 came out on July 16 and was ranked by August 1. Qwen3.8-Max was previewed on July 19 and ranked by August 1. Both needed about two weeks of voting. So a rival flagship has to be public by roughly August 17, and it has to arrive at 1497 or better, because 1474 only beats Moonshot and Alibaba owns 14th place too.
Backing Alibaba by betting against everyone else costs more. No on Moonshot is 97 cents and pays 3.1%. No on Z.ai is 93 and pays 7.5%. All ten no sides together cost about 98.8 cents for the dollar that Alibaba yes gives you for 89. Thus, buying yes Alibaba at 89 cents is the simplest and most logical move right now.
This page does not constitute investing advice. Prediction markets and/or gambling may result in loss of funds. You are advised to conduct your own due diligence before taking any action.
