News Summary:
Alibaba's Qoder announced on September 18, 2026, that its Qwen 3.8-Flash model is available for free to individual users for a limited time, reducing the billing coefficient from 0.1x to 0 until September 30. Earlier on the same day, Alibaba Group and the Pakistan Post Office Department (PPOD) agreed to automate parcel sorting at Pakistan Post, as part of a government-backed initiative to modernize postal operations and upgrade infrastructure, led by the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication. Also on September 18, Qwen released Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash, Alibaba’s new native multimodal model designed for audio and video understanding. This model accepts text, images, audio, and video as input and incorporates thinking support, custom function calling, and web search capabilities. Previously, on September 16, Li Weili, a processor architect at Alibaba DAMO Academy, discussed the progress and challenges of RISC-V in automotive electronics at the Automotive Semiconductor Ecosystem Conference 2026. He noted that while RISC-V applications are viable across IP, IC, complete systems, and software ecosystems, functional safety development still faces hurdles. On the same day, DHL Group and Alibaba signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to investigate how artificial intelligence can refine the complete logistics journey for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) involved in cross-border commerce.
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