Chinese technology company Alibaba released a new version of its artificial intelligence (AI) model Qwen 2.5, which it claimed outperformed the sensational DeepSeek-V3, according to Reuters.
The release of the new AI model came on the first day of the Lunar New Year. Alibaba’s cloud unit stated:
Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms … almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B.
The release of AI assistant DeepSeek, powered by DeepSeek-V3, on 10 January and the release of its R1 model on 20 January stunned Silicon Valley and triggered a plunge in tech stocks.
The low-cost startup led investors to question the huge spending plans for top AI companies in the United States. However, DeepSeek’s success also led to a battle among its domestic competitors to update 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 surpassed the Microsoft-backed OpenAI o1.
The fact that DeepSeek-V2 was open source and unprecedentedly cheap led Alibaba’s cloud division to announce a price cut of up to 97 per cent on the range of models. Other Chinese tech companies followed suit, including Baidu, which launched China’s first ChatGPT analogue in March 2023, and the country’s most valuable internet company, Tencent.
Liang Wenfeng, the mysterious founder of DeepSeek, said last July that his project “did not care” about price wars and that achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) was its main goal. While large Chinese tech companies such as Alibaba have hundreds of thousands of employees, DeepSeek operates as a research lab staffed mostly by young graduates and doctoral students from leading Chinese universities.
Large foundational models require continued innovation, tech giants’ capabilities have their limits.
