Chinese tech giant Alibaba launched its new Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model on Wednesday, claiming it outperforms the renowned DeepSeek-V3.
The timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max release, coinciding with the first day of the Lunar New Year when many Chinese are off work, highlights the pressure DeepSeek’s rapid rise in the past few weeks has placed on both international and domestic competitors.
Alibaba’s cloud unit announced on WeChat that the Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms GPT-4, DeepSeek-V3, and Llama-3.1-405B in nearly all areas.
The launch of DeepSeek’s AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, on January 10, followed by the R1 model on January 20, sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley, causing tech stocks to drop. DeepSeek’s low development and usage costs have made investors question the massive spending plans of major AI firms in the U.S.
DeepSeek’s success also triggered a rush among domestic competitors to enhance their AI models. Just two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, unveiled an updated AI model that claims to outperform Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s o1 in AIME, a benchmark for understanding and responding to complex instructions.
