Alibaba Joins AI Race: Claims New Model Beats DeepSeek, ChatGPT
Alibaba introduced its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model, claiming it outperforms DeepSeek-V3 and others. The launch highlighted competition with DeepSeek.

Alibaba Joins AI Race: On Wednesday, Chinese tech giant Alibaba announced it has released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence that it claims is even better than DeepSeek-V3, according to the news agency Reuters.
The timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max release on the first day of the Lunar New Year, a weekday too, when most Chinese people are with their families, indicates just how much pressure a scintillating rise of three weeks can exert not just on rivals overseas but also on local rivals in China that DeepSeek has exerted.
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The company's cloud unit said in a statement that it is referring to the most advanced open-source AI models from OpenAI and Meta.
Airbnb currently partners with Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Baidu Inc. in routing a large amount of funds into their cloud services. People are engaged in marketing to recruit top AI developer talent in China to both their products under pressure from others, Bloomberg reported.
Founded 20 months ago in Hangzhou, DeepSeek is the startup that has been raising eyebrows in US tech circles for the past week. Alibaba Cloud, too, looked to back its claims by providing scores that suggested its AI beat models from OpenAI and Anthropic in certain benchmarks.
In an attempt to capture market share, price cuts have been used by such cloud service providers as Alibaba and Tencent in the last months. DeepSeek and a half dozen other promising AI startups in China currently in funding rounds at unicorn valuations have already contributed to that price war.
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DeepSeek has ruffled more than a few feathers. Its AI assistant, based on the DeepSeek-V3 model, came to life on January 10, and the R1 model was rolled out on January 20. The consequences were immediate: Tech penalized as investors began to ask whether A-list US investment in this field would even be worth it given reportedly marginal development and operating costs from DeepSeek.
Back home, the startup’s success has kicked off a fierce competition among Chinese tech giants. Just two days after the R1 model dropped, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance fired back with an update to its own flagship AI model, claiming it outperformed OpenAI’s o1—Microsoft’s AI bet—in a key benchmark test that measures how well AI understands and responds to complex instructions.
DeepSeek, of course, had already made a similar claim, saying its R1 model could go head-to-head with OpenAI’s o1 on multiple performance benchmarks.
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