Qwen3-Max (2026-01-23)
Alibaba released the latest Qwen3 Max series in January 2026. The Qwen 3 Max series focuses on achieving a comprehensive and substantial improvements in overall model performance by effectively fusing "thinking modes" with "non-thinking modes", allowing the model to handle tasks with greater versatility and balance rapid responses with deep cognitive processing.
In the new Qwen3-Max series, there are two model variations:
- Qwen3-Max-Thinking (2026-01-23): The reasoning variant of Qwen3-Max, achieving significant performance improvements in factual knowledge, complex reasoning, instruction following, alignment with human preferences, and agent capabilities.
- Qwen3-Max-Instruct (2026-01-23): The chat variant of Qwen3-Max, achieving state-of-the-art results in knowledge, reasoning, coding, instruction following, human preference alignment, agent tasks, and multilingual understanding.
The Qwen3-Max-Instruct & Qwen3-Max-Thinking (2026-01-23) models were released on PolyU GenAI on 1 March 2026 for use by PolyU staff and students.
The Qwen3-Max (2026-01-23) service, powered by Alibaba Cloud Bailian, will incur the following usage fees:
- <= 32K input tokens: 0.359 credits per 1K tokens for input text, and 1.434 credits per 1K tokens for output text, including chain-of-thought tokens.
- 32K < input tokens <= 128K: 0.574 credits per 1K tokens for input text, and 2.294 credits per 1K tokens for output text, including chain-of-thought tokens.
- >128K input tokens: 1.004 credits per 1K tokens for input text, and 4.014 credits per 1K tokens for output text, including chain-of-thought tokens.
For more details, please refer to the Qwen3-Max-Official-Blog and Qwen3-Max-Thinking Official Blog.
Deep Research Tool Updates
We are excited to announce an additional AI model option on the Deep Research Tool, effective 1 March 2026:
- Preview release of the Deep Research Tool’s “Model as a Judge” option, which includes the use of the Qwen3-Max-Thinking (2026-01-23) model, will be available to all staffs and students.
For further details on how to make the most of the Deep Research tool, including tips on formulating effective research topics and understanding credit usage, please refer to the PolyU_GenAI_Deep_Research_Introduction. You may also find a sample output final report in PolyU_GenAI_Deep_Research_GPT5.1_Example_Digital_Currency. We look forward to your feedback as we continue to refine and expand this innovative tool for the PolyU community.
More flexible use of monthly credit entitlements
Effective from 1 March, to give you more flexibility in applying your monthly credit entitlement on the PolyU GenAI app, a new unused credits carry-forward mechanism will come into effect.
- No Expiration: Unused monthly credits will no longer expire at the end of the month. Instead, if you log in to the PolyU Gen AI app on or after 1 March 2026, unused credits at the end of the month in which you first log in will be carried forward to the following month.
- Accumulation Cap: Unused credits carried forward from the previous month plus the monthly entitlement at the start of the following month will not exceed six times your monthly credit entitlement.
How it works:
If your monthly credit entitlement is 1,850 credits and you have 500 unused credits remaining from March, your April balance will start at 2,350 credits (500 + 1,850). You may continue accumulating credits until you reach the cap of 11,100 credits (6 × 1,850).
Why this change?
We understand that academic workloads vary across weeks in the semester. To cater for students’ requirements for study and project work, the unused credit rollover mechanism allows greater flexibility to leverage advanced AI models during specific periods of higher demand.
If you need further information or assistance, please contact the IT HelpCentre (Tel: 2766 5900, WhatsApp/ WeChat: 6577 9669) or reach out to us via the IT Online ServiceDesk.
