Alibaba, the Chinese tech company, has launched its own AI that it claims is more powerful than the DeepSeek model that sent shockwaves around the world. The new version of the Qwen 2.5 system was released on Wednesday: not only days after the viral success of DeepSeek’s system, but also the beginning Lunar New Year, when most Chinese people are not at work. That was likely a demonstration of the frenzied rush to produce powerful new systems within China as well as outside of it, experts said.
"Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms ... almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B," Alibaba's cloud unit said in an announcement posted on its official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta's most advanced open-source AI models. The Jan. 10 release of DeepSeek's AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the Jan. 20 release of its R1 model, has shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares to plunge, with the Chinese startup's purportedly low development and usage costs prompting investors to question huge spending plans by leading AI firms in the United States.
But DeepSeek's success has also led to a scramble among its domestic competitors to upgrade their own AI models. Two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance released an update to its flagship AI model, which it claimed outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI's o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions.
