Qwen4-Max Preview is out, so I paid for Alibaba's Token Plan and gave it the same kind of job I gave Kimi K3.1 Pro last month: build an interactive 3D Noah's Ark in one HTML page. The result is the best ark any model has built for me so far. It has animal pairs, live weather, a captain's log and sound, and it makes my earlier Qwen 3.7 Plus ark look like a toy. It is not perfect. The front of the hull still has a hole in it.
You can try both versions yourself: the Qwen4-Max Preview ark and the Qwen 3.7 Plus ark. Turn the sound on for the Qwen 4 one.
What is Qwen4-Max Preview?
It is the first Qwen 4 model you can actually use. Qwen's announcement calls it a model with "deeper knowledge, richer world understanding" and "stronger coding and agentic capabilities", built for coding, knowledge work, front-end builds and professional software workflows.
It is in preview on Alibaba's Token Plan, and Qwen says you can also get early access in QwenWork, Qoder, the Qwen app and QwenStudio. On Alibaba Cloud's Token Plan page the model ID is qwen4-max-preview (bills show qwen4.0-max-preview), and its listed abilities are reasoning, visual understanding and text generation.
A week ago I wrote about Qwen's fish-and-birds teaser, when Qwen 4 was still only "in training". This is the follow-up I promised: a real Qwen 4 model, tested on a real job.
Are there Qwen4-Max benchmarks?
Not that I could find. I looked for official benchmark tables and did not find any, and the Token Plan page lists no scores either. So this article has no benchmark chart. The ark is the evidence.
That is a bit unusual for a big launch. Kimi K3.1 Pro arrived with a 47-row comparison table against Claude Opus 5.5, which I went through in my Kimi K3.1 Pro benchmarks article. Qwen has gone the other way and asked people to "put it to the test on a real problem". Fine. Here is mine.
How much does the Qwen4-Max preview cost?
During the preview it is cheap. Alibaba Cloud's Token Plan page says Qwen4-Max Preview uses credits at as low as 20% of the standard rate, which is the "80% off" you may have seen. That works out to about five times the usage for the same credits.
There is an extra night discount too. Calls between 22:00 and 08:00 China time get another 60% off, bringing the cost down to 8% of the standard rate. For Brisbane that window is midnight to 10 am.
The catch is the short window. The preview runs from 10:00 on 11 November to 24:00 on 25 November 2026, China time (UTC+8), which is 12 noon on 11 November to 2 am on 26 November in Brisbane. Alibaba says the model will not change during the preview and will be retired when it ends. If you want to test it cheaply, do it in the next two weeks.
What did Qwen4-Max build?
It built a full 3D scene in a single HTML file, about 1,660 lines and 90 KB, using Three.js from a CDN. You start on a title card with a Genesis verse and a "Step Aboard" button, then the ark sails in front of you.
The ark has a curved wooden hull, a two-storey cabin with lit windows, a flag, and seven animal pairs on deck, including giraffes, elephants and zebras. There is a rainbow behind it and a compass in the corner that turns as you orbit.
The side panel, called "Ship's Controls", changes everything live:
- Heavens: time of day, rainfall, wind, sea mist and a rainbow switch.
- The deep: swell height, from calm to rough.
- Ark and crew: the number of animal pairs, lantern glow, a dove you can release, and a wireframe "shipwright's view".
- Helm and lens: auto-orbit, orbit speed and render quality.
There are also Shuffle, Reset and Save view buttons, and keyboard shortcuts (Space for the dove, R to shuffle, S to save). A captain's log in the corner writes a new line as the weather changes. At 22:00 with full rain and wind, the log reads "The windows of heaven are open. Hold to the helm."
Does the Qwen 4 ark have sound?
Yes, and this is the part I liked most. All the sound is generated in the browser with the Web Audio API: there are no audio files. You hear the sea, the rain, the wind, the hull creaking, thunder and the dove. Turn the rain and wind up and the sound follows.
Kimi's swarm ark had a soundscape too, but in the Qwen 4 one the sound follows the controls, so moving a slider changes what you see and what you hear.
What is wrong with the Qwen 4 ark?
The bow has a hole in it. At the front of the ark the two sides of the hull do not meet, so you can see into the deck from outside. The back has the same open gap. It is easy to miss while the camera orbits, but once you see it you cannot stop seeing it.
Funny enough, Kimi K3.1 Pro made the same mistake. Its first ark also had an open bow, and it only closed it after I sent a screenshot. Two different models, same hole. 3D geometry is still where these models slip, and a benchmark score would not tell you that.
I left the Qwen 4 version as it came out, hole included, so you can judge it yourself. Everything else worked in my checks: the page loaded without errors on desktop and at phone width (390 pixels), the controls changed the scene, and the layout moved the controls below the 3D view on a phone.
Is Qwen4-Max better than Qwen 3.7 Plus?
Yes, by a long way. My Qwen 3.7 Plus ark is a brown box on a blue sea. It has a row of yellow windows, a red flag, a few clouds, a dove and a rainbow, and you can drag to orbit. That is about it. It is 309 lines of code, and the bow is a strange wedge sticking out of the box.
It works, but it looks like a toy. The Qwen4-Max version looks like someone designed it: the colours, the type, the lighting at sunset, the little touches like the captain's log. That jump in taste is the biggest change I saw between the two generations.
How does Qwen4-Max compare with Kimi K3.1 Pro?
For this job, Qwen4-Max Preview wins on looks and on sound. Here are all four arks side by side, using real screenshots of each demo:
| Demo | What you get | Bow | My verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen 3.7 Plus | Box ark, orbit and zoom, dove, rainbow | Odd wedge | A toy |
| Kimi K3.1 Pro (26 Oct) | Tours, hotspots, boarding animals, storm, night | Open, fixed after a screenshot | Works, no "wow" |
| Kimi K3.1 Pro swarm (27 Oct) | Four Bible chapters, verses, sound, flood, rainbow | Boxy hull | Better story, weak 3D |
| Qwen4-Max Preview (12 Nov) | Animal pairs, live weather, sea mist, captain's log, procedural sound, wireframe view | Open gap at front and back | Best of the four |
Kimi's swarm version still tells the Bible story better, with chapters and verses. But my complaint about both Kimi arks was the 3D itself: boxy hulls and simple animals. Qwen 4's hull has a proper curve, the light changes with the time of day, and the animals look like animals. Of the four, it is the one I would show people first.
This is one test on one kind of task, not a controlled benchmark. I did not record the time, the credits used or the number of follow-up prompts, so I am not putting a cost per ark beside it. If you want a test with those numbers, my DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017 3D game test recorded them.
Should you try Qwen4-Max Preview?
Yes, if you build front-end or visual work and can use it before 25 November. At 20% of the normal credit rate, and 8% at night, it is a cheap way to see what Qwen 4 can do. Just check the 3D geometry yourself, because "it runs" is not the same as "the boat is closed".
Can you run it at home? Not this one. Qwen4-Max is a cloud model with no open weights so far. The closest thing on an 8GB card is Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, which I ran on my RTX 4060 Ti; Qwen calls it a preview of the architecture that Qwen 4 is built on.
The best way to judge is to open the demos. Start with the Qwen4-Max Preview ark, turn the sound on, push the rain to 100% and then orbit round to the bow. If you like 3D in the browser, Block Drop 3D is a free game on this site you can play next.
Sources
- Qwen's Qwen4-Max announcement ("Qwen4 is coming"), 11 November 2026, supplied by the author.
- Alibaba Cloud Model Studio: Token Plan (Personal) overview: qwen4-max-preview model ID, preview dates, credit discount and night discount.
- Michael Leung: Qwen4-Max Preview 3D Noah's Ark demo and Qwen 3.7 Plus ark demo, both built on 12 November 2026.
- Kimi K3.1 Pro ark test and Kimi K3.1 Pro swarm ark test for the earlier demos.
Checked 13 November 2026. This is one hands-on test, not a benchmark. The two Qwen demos are published as the models wrote them, with only a Google Analytics tag, a canonical link and a link back to this article added. The comparison images are real screenshots of each demo; the cover, sound and toy illustrations were made locally with Qwen Image 2.1, and AI helped me edit this article.
