Alibaba has come up with a new version of its AI model named Qwen 2.5 and it is claimed to be surpassing China’s AI chatbot DeepSeek-V3. The announcement timing is unusual as it is the first day of the Lunar New Year and hints at the growing urgency among Chinese tech firms to keep up with AI advancements.
DeepSeek has been making headlines continuously since its launching on January 10 as an AI assistant powered by DeepSeek-V3. The startup released its R1 model 10 days after on January 20 and the rapid developments have caught the attention of global tech leaders. It has grabbed more attention and particularly in Silicon Valley due to its low development and operational costs. Investors are now questioning the enormous spending by U.S. tech giants on AI research and development.
The cloud division of Alibaba stated that its Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms major AI models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Meta’s Llama-3.1-405B across various performance benchmarks.
The competition among Chinese AI companies has intensified as lately parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, launched an upgrade to its flagship AI model. ByteDance claimed that its model outperformed OpenAI’s o1 in AIME, which is a benchmark test that measures the ability of AI to understand and respond to complex instructions. DeepSeek had made similar claims about its own R1 model and stated that it rivaled OpenAI’s o1 on several performance metrics.
All these highlights fierce AI battle within China as companies are racing to develop more powerful as well as cost-effective AI solutions. Chinese firms like Alibaba, DeepSeek and ByteDance are pushing AI boundaries with a focus on efficiency and affordability.
The latest move of Alibaba signals that the AI race in China is far from slowing down. The competition in AI development will likely reshape the industry in the coming months.