Alibaba releases AI model it claims surpasses DeepSeek-V3

BEIJING - Chinese tech company Alibaba on Jan 29 released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence (AI) model that it claimed surpassed

the highly acclaimed DeepSeek-V3.

The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max’s release – the first day of the Chinese New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families – points to the pressure Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek’s meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition.

“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 Jan 10 release of DeepSeek’s AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the Jan 20 release of its R1 model, has shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares to plunge, with the Chinese start-up’s purportedly low development and usage costs prompting investors to question huge spending plans by leading AI firms in the United States.

But DeepSeek’s success has also led to a scramble among its domestic competitors to upgrade 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 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 rivalled OpenAI’s o1 on several performance benchmarks. REUTERS