Chinese tech giant Alibaba has introduced Qwen 2.5-Max, an enhanced version of its artificial intelligence model that claims it outperforms the highly regarded DeepSeek-V3.
The news was announced on Wednesday at an unusual time—the first day of the Lunar New Year—highlighting the growing competitive pressure from DeepSeek, a fast-rising Chinese AI startup.
According to Alibaba's cloud unit, Qwen 2.5-Max surpasses OpenAI's GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and Meta's Llama-3.1-405B in performance metrics. The release marks Alibaba's response to the disruption made by DeepSeek, an AI assistant powered by DeepSeek-V3, on January 10 and the R1 model on January 20.
DeepSeek's rapid rise has surprised Silicon Valley and raised concerns about AI development expenses among major US tech firms.
However, DeepSeek's impact has increased competitiveness in China. Just two days after the launch of the R1 model, ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, rolled out an updated AI model, claiming it has outperformed OpenAI's o1 in the AIME benchmark for understanding and responding to complex instructions. This mirrors DeepSeek's claim that its R1 model outperforms OpenAI's o1 on various performance criteria.
DeepSeek's climb to fame began in May 2023, after the release of the DeepSeek-V2 model, which marked an AI price war in China. DeepSeek prompted competitors, including Alibaba, to dramatically lower their prices by offering an open-source approach at a low cost—just 1 yuan ($0.14) for every 1 million tokens. Baidu and Tencent followed suit, aiming to keep their foothold in the rapidly evolving AI industry.
Despite the competitive environment, DeepSeek's founder, Liang Wenfeng, has remained focused on achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) and ignored concerns about price wars.
Unlike Alibaba's large workforce, DeepSeek operates more like a research lab led by young graduates and PhD students. Liang has warned that China's major IT companies may struggle to keep up with the AI revolution due to high expenses and restrictive organizational structures.
With the struggle for AI dominance heating up, Alibaba's recent initiative demonstrates that China's tech giants are trying to keep up with DeepSeek's disruptive momentum.
The battle for AGI is heating up, and competition in China is strong in the global AI landscape.