Alibaba, a major tech company from China, has launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) model called Qwen 2.5-Max. The company claims it is even better than well-known models like DeepSeek-V3, GPT-4o, and Llama-3.1-405B.
Interestingly, Alibaba released Qwen 2.5-Max on the first day of the Lunar New Year, a holiday when most people in China are spending time with their families. This unusual timing shows how much pressure Alibaba faces from the fast rise of DeepSeek, a new AI company that has been making waves both in China and around the world.
In a statement shared on WeChat, Alibaba’s cloud team said, “Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms models like DeepSeek-V3, GPT-4o, and Llama-3.1-405B.”
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DeepSeek recently gained worldwide attention by launching its DeepSeek-V3 AI assistant on January 10, followed by the R1 model on January 20. These powerful releases have surprised Silicon Valley and made some investors worried about the high costs of AI development in the U.S.
DeepSeek’s quick success has pushed Chinese companies to improve their AI models rapidly. Just two days after DeepSeek-R1 came out, ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, updated its main AI model. ByteDance claimed its AI model outperformed OpenAI’s o1 in a key test called AIME, which measures how well AI understands and answers difficult questions.
This competition between AI companies in China shows how fast technology is evolving and how much pressure there is to stay ahead in the AI race.
