Chinese tech company Alibaba launched a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model on Wednesday, claiming it surpassed the highly-regarded DeepSeek-V3.
The timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max’s release, coinciding with the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work, reflects the pressure DeepSeek’s rapid rise in the past three weeks has placed on both international competitors and domestic companies.
“Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms almost across the board GPT-4, DeepSeek-V3, and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba’s cloud unit stated in an statement on its official WeChat account, referring to the most advanced open-source AI models from OpenAI and Meta.
The January 10 release of DeepSeek’s AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, followed by the January 20 launch of its R1 model, has stunned Silicon Valley and caused a sharp decline in tech shares. The Chinese startup’s reportedly low development and usage costs have raised concerns among investors about the massive spending plans of leading U.S. AI firms.
Meanwhile, DeepSeek’s success has triggered a rush among domestic competitors to upgrade their own AI models.
Two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance unveiled an update to its flagship AI model, claiming it outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that evaluates how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions.
