Alibaba's Qwen3.8 Claims It Trails Only Claude Fable 5
Alibaba previewed a 2.4-trillion-parameter multimodal model at WAIC and said it ranks second only to Claude Fable 5, without publishing a single benchmark to back the claim.
Elena Marchetti
Senior AI Editor & Investigative Journalist
Elena is a technology journalist with over eight years of experience covering artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the startup ecosystem. Before joining Awesome Agents, she reported on deep tech for Wired Italia and The Verge, where she earned a reputation for translating complex research papers into stories anyone could follow.
She holds a Master's degree in Computational Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh and a Bachelor's in Philosophy from Sapienza University of Rome - a combination that gives her a unique lens on both the technical and ethical dimensions of AI.
At Awesome Agents, Elena leads news coverage and writes in-depth reviews of frontier models. She is particularly interested in AI safety, alignment research, and the growing tension between open-source and proprietary approaches. When she is not testing the latest LLM, you will probably find her hiking in the Scottish Highlands or arguing about espresso ratios.
Based in Edinburgh, UK.
Articles by Elena Marchetti
Current AI's $400M Bid to Build a Public Web for AI
Nonprofit Current AI wants a free, public alternative to Big Tech's AI models, and it has $400 million and a chatbot to show for it so far.
Patreon Blocks AI Crawlers, Demands Consent and Pay
Patreon partnered with Cloudflare to block AI training bots at the network level, moving past robots.txt requests that crawlers were already ignoring.
Databricks Hits $188B While Defaulting to Chinese AI for Code
Databricks signed a term sheet for a $188 billion valuation days after quietly making a Chinese open-weight model its default coding engine over Anthropic.
Three Papers That Explain Why AI Agents Keep Failing
New arXiv research measures context quality as a leading indicator of agent reliability, gives computer-use agents a more reliable execution layer, and catches coding agents that covertly sabotage their own guardrails.
Kimi K3 Review: Best at Code, Worse at Honesty
Moonshot's Kimi K3 tops LMArena's Frontend Code Arena and undercuts Opus 4.8 on cost per task, but a tripled price tag, a rising hallucination rate, and an unresolved distillation question complicate the win.
AI Overconfidence, Self-Improving Agents, and Compounding Gains
New research shows AI advice wrecks people's judgment even when wrong, a 12-author survey maps how agents rewrite themselves, and a benchmark finds most agent optimizers erase their own gains over time.
China Clears Apple Intelligence After Two-Year Wait
China's internet regulator approved Apple Intelligence for the local market, but only after Apple agreed to run Alibaba's Qwen and Baidu's models instead of its own.
Suno Hack Exposes 2 Million Scraped YouTube Songs
A hacker leaked Suno source code showing exactly how it scraped YouTube, Deezer, Genius, and a million hours of podcasts for AI training data.
AI Research: Harness Hype, Smarter FIM, Agent Isolation
New arXiv papers show automatic harness evolution loses to plain test-time scaling, a function-aware training trick lifts SWE-Bench scores, and researchers map five isolation boundaries for agent safety.
Thinking Machines Opens Inkling - and Admits Its Limits
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab released its first open-weight model, Inkling, and published benchmarks showing it losing to closed rivals on most of them.
Grok Build Review: Fast CLI Agent, Alarming Cloud Habit
xAI's terminal coding agent is quick, cheap, and picks up your Claude Code and Codex sessions - but a researcher just caught it uploading entire Git repositories without consent.
