Chinese tech company Alibaba on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model, which it claims surpasses the highly acclaimed DeepSeek-V3.
The model, the Qwen 2.5-Max, was released on the first day of the Chinese New Year. The company also open sourced its visual model, the Qwen 2.5-VL, on Tuesday. The company also provided cloud computing support to the live broadcast of the Spring Festival Gala, the country’s annual variety show, viewed by billions, and blends music, dance, opera, martial arts, and comedy that same day.
“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.
The January 10 release of DeepSeek’s AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the latest 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 United States.
DeepSeek’s success has also led to a scramble among its domestic competitors to upgrade their 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.
(With input from Reuters)