Everything You Need to Know About Alibaba's New Qwen 2.5 Model

Alibaba has announced the release of a new version of its AI model, Qwen 2.5, which the company claims outperforms its advanced DeepSeek-V3 model.

The announcement comes on the first day of the Chinese Lunar New Year, an unusual timing for technology releases, reflecting the pressure that the rise of Chinese startup DeepSeek is putting on international and domestic competitors.

Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and Llama-3.1-405B

In an official statement on WeChat, Alibaba's cloud computing unit said that the Qwen 2.5-Max model outperforms most of the world's advanced models, including:

1. GPT-4o (OpenAI's most advanced model)
2. DeepSeek-V3 (the AI ​​model that shocked Silicon Valley)
3. Llama-3.1-405B (Meta's latest model)

DeepSeek's rise shocks the AI ​​market

The launch of DeepSeek's smart assistant on January 10, based on the DeepSeek-V3 model, caused a major upheaval in the global tech market, with major tech stocks falling due to the low cost of developing and operating the DeepSeek model compared to its competitors.

The shock was compounded by the launch of DeepSeek-R1 on January 20, which raised concerns among US AI companies about the huge investments being made in developing new models.

Competition within China:

The competition is not limited to US companies only, as DeepSeek’s successes have prompted major Chinese tech companies to quickly update their models:

ByteDance (owner of TikTok) released an update to its AI model just two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, claiming that it outperformed OpenAI’s o1 model in the AIME test, a benchmark for measuring AI’s ability to understand complex commands.

Baidu, which launched the first ChatGPT competitor in China in March 2023, has slashed prices for its AI services after DeepSeek launched its predecessor, DeepSeek-V2, at a very low price of 1 yuan ($0.14) per million tokens, forcing Alibaba to cut its prices by 97% in May.

Tencent, China’s largest internet company, has also entered the race to develop more efficient AI models

DeepSeek Focuses on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

In a rare interview with Chinese media outlet Waves in July, Liang Wenfeng, the mysterious founder of DeepSeek, said the company “doesn’t care” about price wars, as its primary goal is to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), a concept that refers to AI systems that surpass humans in most economic tasks.

Liang added that China’s big tech companies may not be the best fit for the future of the AI ​​industry due to their high costs and reliance on hierarchical management structures, while DeepSeek operates under a flexible and efficient operating model, led by graduates and young researchers from top Chinese universities.

The Future Landscape: Will China Dominate the AI ​​Market?

As competition escalates between DeepSeek, Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, China appears to be at the center of the global AI race.

If China’s AI models continue to evolve at their current rate, the industry could see shifts that reshape technology globally, with power centers shifting from Silicon Valley to Beijing and Shanghai.