Alibaba today rolled out the latest version of its Qwen 2.5 AI model, claiming it is better than the competition and even the recently launched, disruptive DeepSeek-V3 — reports Reuters.
“Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms … almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” the Chinese tech giant’s cloud arm said in an announcement on WeChat.
Alibaba’s release of Qwen 2.5-Max follows the massive success of fellow Chinese company DeepSeek, which shook the AI industry to the core this month with its impressive yet supposedly built-on-a-shoestring models.
DeepSeek’s AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, has overtaken ChatGPT while its reasoning model, DeepSeek-R1, has deeply impressed experts. All of this despite seemingly being developed on a fraction of the enormous budgets U.S.-based AI incumbents like OpenAI, Google, and Meta are allocating to their AI ambitions. As a result, companies and investors alike are rethinking what it takes to build top-of-the-line AI models.
The peculiar timing of Alibaba’s decision to launch Qwen 2.5-Max — the start of the Lunar New Year, a holiday in China — is a testament to the pressure even local tech giants are feeling to catch up with DeepSeek.
DeepSeek, however, doesn’t feel threatened by the AI efforts of China’s tech incumbents. “Large foundational models require continued innovation, tech giants’ capabilities have their limits,” the research lab-style company’s CEO, Liang Wenfeng, told Chinese media in July. At the same time, he said DeepSeek’s main goal was achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI).
On the Western front, meanwhile, OpenAI has accused DeepSeek of illegally using ChatGPT to train its AI models.
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