HONG KONG (CHATNEWSTV) — Chinese tech giant Alibaba (9988.HK) on Wednesday released an updated version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model, claiming it outperforms the widely acclaimed DeepSeek-V3.
The timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max’s launch, on the first day of the Lunar New Year—a holiday when most Chinese citizens are off work—suggests growing pressure from the meteoric rise of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. The company’s rapid ascent in the past three weeks has challenged not only overseas competitors but also its domestic rivals.
“Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms … almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba’s cloud unit said in a statement posted on its official WeChat account, referencing 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, and its Jan. 20 launch of the R1 model have rattled Silicon Valley and sent tech shares tumbling. Investors are now questioning the massive spending plans of leading U.S. AI firms, as DeepSeek’s purportedly lower development and usage costs have disrupted industry expectations.
