Chinese tech giant Alibaba is flexing its muscles in the global race for artificial intelligence (AI) dominance, claiming the latest version of its Qwen 2.5 can take on the top models from rivals both foreign and domestic.
Not to be outdone by the attention surrounding fellow Chinese firm DeepSeek – which rocked the U.S. tech sector this week with its purported emergence as a potential rival to leading American AI companies – Alibaba says its latest offering is superior to them all in nearly every measure.
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“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.
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Alibaba’s Qwen account on X posted stats indicating how the model stacks up against its competitors, claiming, “It achieves competitive performance against the top-tier models, and outcompetes DeepSeek V3 in benchmarks like Arena Hard, LiveBench, LiveCodeBench, GPQA-Diamond.”
The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max’s release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition.
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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 U.S.
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.
This echoed DeepSeek’s claim that its R1 model rivaled OpenAI’s o1 on several performance benchmarks.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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