Alibaba Launches New AI Model to Rival Competitors
BEIJING: On Wednesday, Chinese tech giant Alibaba unveiled the Qwen 2.5-Max, an upgraded version of its artificial intelligence (AI) model, claiming that it surpasses the widely praised DeepSeek-V3.
The release of Qwen 2.5-Max on the first day of the Lunar New Year, a time when many Chinese people are away from work celebrating with their families, highlights the intense competition in the AI industry, particularly in response to the rapid rise of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek over the past few weeks.
Alibaba’s cloud division announced on WeChat that the Qwen 2.5-Max model “outperforms almost every AI model, including GPT-4, DeepSeek-V3, and Llama-3.1-405B,” referring to the most advanced models from OpenAI and Meta.
The success of DeepSeek, which launched its AI assistant powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model on January 10 and its R1 model on January 20, has stunned Silicon Valley, causing a drop in tech shares. DeepSeek’s low development costs have raised concerns about the substantial spending by leading AI companies in the United States.
DeepSeek’s success has also prompted a rush among its domestic competitors to enhance their own AI offerings. Just two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, rolled out an updated version of its AI model. This new model claimed to outperform Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s o1 in the AIME benchmark test, which measures AI’s ability to understand and respond to complex instructions. This claim echoed DeepSeek’s assertion that its R1 model rivaled OpenAI’s o1 in several performance metrics.
