Alibaba Launches New AI Model Claiming to Surpass DeepSeek

On Wednesday, Chinese tech giant Alibaba unveiled its newly enhanced Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model. The company asserts that this model, named Qwen 2.5-Max, surpasses the praised DeepSeek-V3, which has recently captured attention in the AI space.

This launch coincided with the first day of the Chinese New Year, marking a festive occasion for the introduction of new technology. Additionally, Alibaba open-sourced its visual AI model, Qwen 2.5-VL, just a day prior to the announcement. On the same day as the Qwen 2.5-Max unveiling, Alibaba also provided cloud computing support for the live streaming of the Spring Festival Gala, a major annual entertainment event in China that attracts billions of viewers with its blend of music, dance, opera, and comedy.

According to Alibaba's cloud unit, they stated in a post on WeChat that "Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms...almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and Llama-3.1-405B." This emphasizes Alibaba's confidence in their new model in relation to other advanced AI systems developed by OpenAI and Meta.

The recent announcements in the AI landscape have stirred significant reactions, particularly following the January 10 release of DeepSeek's AI assistant based on the DeepSeek-V3 model. This event has reportedly caused a drop in tech stocks in Silicon Valley, as investors expressed concerns regarding the high funding and spending strategies of major AI corporations in the United States, especially given DeepSeek's capabilities at lower development and operational costs.

DeepSeek's success has incited local competitors in China to enhance their own AI offerings. In a competitive move, ByteDance, the parent firm of TikTok, updated its flagship AI model shortly after DeepSeek-R1's release. ByteDance claims its updated model now outperforms OpenAI’s o1 according to AIME, a standard test assessing AI systems' capabilities in understanding complex instructions.

This competitive race reflects the brewing tension in the AI industry, as companies strive to improve their technologies and remain relevant in a market that is rapidly evolving.

AI, technology, innovation