Alibaba Releases Qwen 2.5, Surpasses DeepSeek-V3

Alibaba unveiled its new AI model, Qwen 2.5-Max, claiming it surpasses DeepSeek-V3. The release coincided with the Lunar New Year, reflecting the pressure from DeepSeek’s rapid rise. Alibaba’s cloud unit announced that Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and Meta’s Llama-3.1-405B.

DeepSeek’s AI assistant, launched in January, caused tech shares to drop due to its low development and usage costs. This success prompted domestic rivals, including ByteDance, to upgrade their AI models. ByteDance’s updated model reportedly outperformed OpenAI’s o1 in AIME, an AI benchmark test. This intensified competition among AI developers, both in China and globally.