Chinese tech company Alibaba launched a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model on Wednesday. The company claimed that this model surpasses the well-regarded DeepSeek-V3.
The timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max’s release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year, is notable. Most Chinese people are taking a break to be with their families, highlighting the pressure that DeepSeek’s rapid rise in the past three weeks has put on both foreign and domestic competitors.
In an announcement on its official WeChat account, Alibaba’s cloud unit stated, “Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms … almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B.” These references were to OpenAI and Meta’s most advanced open-source AI models.
DeepSeek’s AI assistant, which uses the DeepSeek-V3 model, launched on January 10. Additionally, the release of its R1 model on January 20 shocked Silicon Valley and led to a decline in tech stocks. Investors are now questioning the substantial spending plans of leading AI firms in the United States due to DeepSeek’s comparably low development and usage costs.
DeepSeek’s success has triggered a rush among domestic competitors to enhance their AI models.
TikTok owner ByteDance responded by releasing an updated version of its flagship AI model just two days after the DeepSeek-R1 launch. ByteDance claimed that its updated model outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that assesses AI models’ comprehension and response capabilities to complex instructions.
This move echoed DeepSeek’s assertion that its R1 model rivaled OpenAI’s o1 on several performance benchmarks.
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